Lots of Melvins releases in the past decade could be called either conceptual or gimmicky, depending on your perspective. There were the collaborations on The Crybaby with everyone from David Yow to Leif Garrett; full-album partnerships with Jello Biafra, Lustmord, and Fantômas; a staged "live" version of Houdini; and whatever the intermittently awesome Hostile Ambient Takeover was supposed to be. Interesting music at every stop, but overall an uneven track record, one that encourages doubts about any new Melvins diversion.
Still, the idea behind Chicken Switch is promising. The band gave entire albums (and sometimes more) to noisy experimental artists, letting each melt, slice, and demolish the music into five-minute-or-so chunks. And the concept works, mostly because the band chose interesting remixers rather than famous ones. The only well-known names here are Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo, Matmos, and Boredoms' Eye Yamatsuka, and even Melvins fans may not recognize the other participants. But everyone involved attacks their work with vigor, precision, and an insatiable desire to test limits. And they all bring their A-games to Chicken Switch, making it less a Melvins remix record than a compilation of excellent experimental music.
In other words, these aren't Melvins riffs set to dance beats. Occasionally the diehard fan might recognize the odd chord or familiar rhythm-- take Eye's loop of chugging riffs, or Ranaldo's busy multi-song edit, one of the few tracks with recognizable vocals. But more typical is the entry from Germany's Christoph Heemann. "Emperor Twaddle (Remix)" opens with three minutes of ringing drone-- stretching and thickening the intro of Honky's "They All Must Be Slaughtered" well past its original length-- followed by 30 seconds of riffs and beats blurred into cacophony.
Most of Chicken Switch employs that kind of scorched-earth approach. Rather than rearranging the Melvins' basic atoms, the remixers split them apart, creating unpredictable bursts of noise and texture with completely new DNA. In that sense, "remix" is too narrow a term for what's going on here. Better to call these reincarnations, with the participants basically murdering the original music and pumping new breath and blood into its hollowed-out remains.
This process produces impressive diversity. German artist RLW (who himself crafted a similar guest-remix project called Tulpas in the late 1990s) makes what sounds like a minimalist string quartet dragging their bows across metal objects. Viennese electronic group Farmers Manual compose a symphony of blips and growls, like a farther-out version of Black Dice. Japanese noise king Merzbow offers a soothing din chopped up by a clanging beat. And former Melvin David Scott Stone stretches King Buzzo's vocals into a wordless choir of gurgling drones.
The highlight of Chicken Switch comes from Kawabata Makoto of Acid Mothers Temple. "4th Floor Hellcopter" opens with a slow, crunchy beat, slides into forbidding feedback, then ascends into burning metal guitar and stereo-spanning dissonance. Kawabata bridges the gap between recognizable riffs and all-out abstraction, pointing out the rich diversity inside the Melvins' music. As a whole, Chicken Switch does the same. Its wide sonic range is testament to how much lurks beneath the surface of every Melvins album. Whatever faults one can find in their experiments, their work is clearly deep enough to be worthy of such off-center explorations.
