Is it uncharitable to suggest that the vast numbers of tribute acts the Melvins have inspired in their 20-year run are as much the result of some crucial flaw in the band's sound as they are an homage to its greatness? Former Melvin Joe Preston recreated that group's faux-operatic, sub-sonic bass rumbling with Thrones, then went on to help Earth hone in on the latent power of the Melvins' crackling guitar drones, flipping them into the dirge-y masterpieces Melvins wouldn't write. Boris borrowed their name from a Bullhead song title, and their titanic volume from the band's early records, but still let their sound stray from Melvins' drummer Dale Crover's Bonham stomp into more varied space. Sludgy tribute-song contributors Eyehategod were more visceral, and Nirvana were definitely better songwriters. And then there is Big Business, the two-piece Melvins-homage act whose Here Come the Waterworks I like better than anything the Melvins have ever released, mostly because the Waterworks songs are less detached, less route-- more memorable, more concise, more dynamic.
As it happens, this newest Melvins is called Nude With Boots, which I guess is what happens in hard rock when fairies lose their clothes, and is the band's second release with Big Business' Coady Willis and Jared Warren as members. This meta-collaboration coughed up (A) Senile Animal in 2006, the band's most listenable record in a decade or so. The extra personnel helped them really wreak havoc on already erratic time signatures, plus they went in for some spine-tingling and unlikely double and triple melodies, a first in a catalogue without a major surprise since the monotonous noise terror of 2001's The Colossus of Destiny.
Nude With Boots opens with "The Kicking Machine", the latest in a long tradition of album-opening Melvins tracks that sound a lot like Led Zeppelin songs (pretty much "Good Times Bad Times" without the fey chorus), particularly all of Lysol, whose entire triggered drum sound was lifted off of Houses of the Holy. "Billy Fish" revives (A) Senile Animal's big-guy-with-pigtails vocal harmonies; "The Smiling Cobra" is more Crover bass drum worship. It's unclear how there hasn't been a Melvins track named "Dies Iraea" before; its twangy drone and cymbal taps are a lot like what Earth started sounding like after they stopped sounding like the Melvins. The doubleshot of "The Stupid Creep" (deadpan sneering) and "The Savage Hippy" (drum machine type brutality) could be a Big Black nod, but maybe I think that just because of the Racer-X-like songtitles.
What's left to say? This band is still nearly as big, as slow, as lumberingly loud as they were in the days Kurt Cobain was trying out for a spot on bass. Their disciples help but not meaningfully: What would you say in a room full of your heroes? What has nothing to do Nude With Boots is the band's unending regression to its own amusement, its abstract stomp, its desire to punish (last track "It Tastes Better Than the Truth" pits a howling Buzzo and Warren against one another). Melvins have got nothing to do with me, which isn't to say I don't like 'em. They've got a great drum sound.
