The title of this album reeks of self-reflection; I'm gonna guess Mudhoney became translucent, oh, probably right around October 26th, 1993, with the release of Five Dollar Bob's Mock Cooter Stew. And when grunge lost its relevance to the music world at large in the mid-90s, Mudhoney simply became invisible. Much has been made of their continued determination to pummel a very dead horse, but old habits die hard. I mean, they've been rolling in the mud since it was still cool to be clean-- why stop now? When has lack of 'relevance' stopped most bands, really, and why, necessarily, should it? If Mudhoney could continue to belt out "Touch Me I'm Sick"-caliber raunch, pertinence could go suck it.
But, oh, music fans, such is not the case. So I'll waste no time getting to the point: Since We've Become Translucent is the most grinding, plodding, lumbering, overwrought hunk of sludge that I've had the misfortune of slogging through this year (I had to break out the hip-waders). Yet despite this, it's not even particularly awful-- it just makes you work for the good stuff. Hard. Yeah, early Mudhoney ain't exactly feathery-- "In 'N' Out of Grace" and "I Have to Laugh" are like 800-pound gorillas compared to some of the limp-wristed sissy-boy crap that's come along since. But now, where massive riffs were once churned out at light-speed, there's only the sound of what seems like a painful duty for Mark Arm and friends. And the worst part is that it sounds exactly like Mudhoney-- from the ultra-fuzzed guitars, to the primal percussion, to Arm's vitriolic, sneering vocals-- minus all the brute, unprocessed energy that originally made them so distinctive.
The vocal/lyrical force is one of the few positive aspects of this disc, so I'll give credit where it's due. Arm still belches some of the silliest, throw-away (as in 'awesome') lyrics in rock with all the requisite conviction. The words, naturally, are of tertiary importance compared to the attitude behind them, and that's for the best, because this is one of the band's few remaining strong points. Few other voices in rock can make otherwise abysmal lyrics like, "When you lash out against societeee/ And find yourself in penitentiareee/ And your cellmate says, 'You belong to meeee'/ You gotta take it like a maaan," sound this entertaining. Seriously.
And it's not as though there aren't a few songs present that don't bring back fond memories. If every track on Translucent had even a fraction of the passion that comes through in the screeching and wailing of the closing moments on "Winner's Circle"-- home to the album's best use of horns (the only significant instrumental change from vintage Mudhoney)-- it might shoot the rating up three full points. Admittedly, two other songs do share some of this track's pummeling sturm und drang: "The Straight Life"'s chorus alone saves it from writhing under its own tonnage, resulting in a strange, lurching sort of tune that ends up damn enjoyable; and the urgency of "Dyin' for It" makes it a close second for best in show. But the sad fact is, the rest of this album's cuts are lifeless husks by comparison. Even the opening of "Winner's Circle" drags.
The other tunes consist mainly of straightforward, generic homogeneity. Things slow to a crawl for much of the album, and without the frantic drive, there's nothing but traditional song structures and ancient, played-out progressions. This is the sound of Grunge Past, raised from the dead to parade its rigor-mortised corpse around for a few moments before returning to the grave. And it's kinda fun, but hardly bears a second listen. Mudhoney's sound is one of the most monolithic in grunge-- vintage or 'post'-- and back when the desire was more evident, there was nothing wrong with that. But now, lack of invention has stagnated the band's otherwise tolerable strains of filth, and left them with a record that's too often content to be nothing special.
That is, when it isn't overwhelmingly bad, which, thankfully, is only for one track: the opener, "Baby, Can You Dig the Light." This eight-minute, forty-second behemoth is interminable; its grim monotony throws all the most obvious failings of Translucent directly in your face and dares you to walk away. Surviving that, the album proves to be somewhat more enjoyable, even if it tastes like unsalted drywall. Previous releases suffered from the same sort of rut, but the energy was mostly there; if nothing else, it sounded like a labor of love. Here, unfortunately, it just sounds like labor.
