The Melvins- Nude With Boots

The Melvins have aged like a fine wine, but go down more like a cocktail of gasoline, bourbon, concrete, and tarantulas. Hailing as the almighty kings of sludge for damn near thirty years now, the core duo of King Buzzo and Dale Crover (Joe Preston's been out of the picture for quite some time now) created a new monster of sorts by grafting together with fellow Seatle noisemakers Big Business (Karp, The Murder City Devils) on 2006's (A) Senile Animal. Luckily, this wasn't a one-off wet dream, and the Big Business boyz have been a permenant part of the Melvins machine ever since, touring, terrorizing, and melting faces. Nude With Boots is the second album from this superMelvins monstrosity, and proves that this band has a lot of life left in them.

The latter album and this one have been more listenable than previous Melvins concoctions (compared to say, Pigs of the Roman Empire), but let's not jump to conclusions: this still rips. The album "kicks" things off with "The Kicking Machine," rich with strong Zeppelin-esque riffage, with more classic rock raging ensuing on "Suicide In Progress" (which ends with what seems to sound like silverware falling in reverse).

"The Stupid Creep" is a short and sweet rocker in the vein of Ozma classics like "Oven" and "Claude" while "Dog Island," the longest song on the record at 7:32 (the bulk of the songs under 4 minutes), is classic Melvins sludge-drone, complete with a tribal Crover drum solo at the end. If the Crover/Willis drum combo doesn't get you hard, than you should probably be thrown into an open grave full of venomous snakes.

The band still likes to wallow in sludgy noise drenched waters as is apparent in "The Savage Hippy," and the closing track "It Tastes Better Than the Truth," sees the band dueling it out in a a shrieking march towards insanity.

While not as strong as (A) Senile Animal, Nude With Boots is solid Melvins material. The Melvins will never die, and as long as they are keeping me on my toes and shedding my skin a bit, I hope they live forever. Love live the fucking Melvins.

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Torche- Meanderthal

Carved out of the massive entity formerly known as Floor and featuring members of Cavity and Shitstorm, Miami FL's Torche have created a sound so large it could have roamed the earth freely amongst the prehistoric dinosaurs millions of years ago. Mesozoic layers of shattering bass forged together with heroic guitars and majestic vocals flying over a molten sea of doom, Meanderthal, their first album on Hydra Head Records, is epic and far from prehistoric. Torche take heavy music farther than the naked eye can see.

In merely four years as a band and two albums and one EP into it, Torche have managed to expand their sound and grow musically with every release, which is a difficult task to pull off. Meanderthal maintains a beautiful balance of heavy and melodic, soaring and thrashing, crushing and soothing. Doom pop anthems like "Grenades" and "Healer" could really find a place in the ears of anyone with an interest in rock music, while tracks like "Pirana" and "Speed of The Nail" throw the switch into the red and fly in like a T-Rex assault. And that's just in the first half of the album!

The second half of the album sinks deep into the sludge and paralyzes you with heavy, tribal, psychedelic waves of crusty rock as the album ends with the title track pounding you into the ground like a giant hammer.

Torche have found a way to dodge the pigeonholing commonly found in heavy music and have created a solid rock album that could crossover and cater to many different audiences while still pushing the limits of heavy, experimental music. Album of the year???

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