

vote
8.5
- Band:
Melvins - Duration: 00:53:18
- Available since: 12/07/1996
- Label:
-
Atlantic Records
Within a record market that finds a fertile ground in the reprints to regenerate and survive, it is possible to recover boxes with unusual content (at least for the production houses involved): it happened with the L7, of which Cherry Red has reprinted L “Full Slash catalog in” Wargasm “(which we also point out for the delicate cover), and more recently with the Melvins, who have seen their adventure on Atlantic told in a box set (“ At the stake, Atlantic Records 1993-1996 “). In fact, the three CDs collect all the music with which King Buzzo, Dale Crover and Various bassists honored the contract with the label in question, three albums and a few frattaglia with a good flavor (above all the cover of “Interstellar Overdrive”, then recovered in the 'Anthology “Electroretard”).
Even today, the fact that a major was interested in this band is difficult to explain, if not with a short -circuit of the system. The bug in question, as we all know, was called Kurt Cobain, who in honor of Karma decided to disdain themselves with the musicians who had supported him since the beginning (“Bleach” has the active contribution of Dale Crover behind the battery) looking, in a somewhat utopian way, to bring the Melvins to the masses. The story is rather known: the Nirvana leader tries to produce “Houdini” without having the skills, is fired, and the album (wonderful, in any case) seems recorded after a drummer has taken control of the mixer.
During the recordings of “Stoner Witch” (1994), Atlantic probably wonders each other as that disturbing bush with the guitar with the guitar wrapped in their recording studio, and they cannot guess how much a careful production would have made it possible to be sold ( But perhaps distorted) pieces like “Queen”, “Shevil” and above all “Revolve”, the most commercial piece ever written by the three up to that moment.
“Stag” comes out two years later, with the band still assisted in the studio by Ggarth (son of art, who will also work with Devin Townsend and Rage Against The Machine), and represents a point of no return for their career. If the Melvins discography is, until then, extremely coherent for sound, writing and also for that delicious sense of oppression that cause the songs of “Ozma” and “Lysol”, in the fifty minutes of “Stag” all those are crowded Ideas, those intuitions that will be the basis of their future path and which will culminate in the (a little long -long) creative trilogy “Crybaby”/”The Maggot”/”The Bootlicker”.
Before starting, however, the band shows how much the practice knows how to make really perfect, because the “The Bit” Open is one of the most important pieces of the entire GRUNGE epic, an incede of hypnotic guitars that embraces a sinuous, buzz busy melody In the most convincing vocal test of its history, which culminates in a “I'm alive” roar in the magnificent refrain. You rock your head, swallowed by so much beauty, and you don't realize that you have an album in front of an album that makes Plot Twist his reason to be: “Bar-X-The Rocking M” is an enthralling Hard Rock where Scratch coexist ( In a sort of parody Nu Metal) and wind (complete with trombone solo), “The Bloat” has a long intra -stoner/psychedelic introduction first retract in the darkness of an asphyxiating Sudge Metal dominated by voice and bass, “Tipping the Lion” He could have figured out among the missing hits of “Houdini”, while “Black Bock” is an unusual indie-pop number that culminates in a (very successful) refrain shoegaze. Just when we feel authorized to lower the guard, “Goggles” and “Lecrimosa” brown the listener to “Gluey Porch Treatments”, pushing his face into a distorted and suffocating Doom mud, with a pachydermal pass, almost unbearable in the Over ten minutes of total duration, a repressed anger that even “Buck Owens”, placed in interlude, struggles to make it flow, despite the groove metal tone and the great work of Dale Crover on drums.
The secret of this album therefore lies in containing large pieces (partially in the shade by the perfection of “The Bit”) disturbed by a damned smile, which makes them perhaps more difficult to understand, and at the same time more fascinating, such as “Skin Horse “, With its melody alternative rock suffocated by distortions (and with a childish tone in the second part), or the” Berthas “Southern Rock and the perfect hard blues of” Captain Pungent “, two songs that you would like to see how” Goggles “And that instead they just exceed three minutes.
“Stag” is this, a kaleidoscope of ideas (many of which, as we have said, will be recycled and expanded by the same Melvins in the years to come, under the aegis of Mike Patton), a snapshot on that indecipherable construction site which is the mind of King Buzzo, where hundreds of worker musicians Caziezia, regardless of the listeners behind the networks who, like many umarellprotest that a song, a beautiful song, cannot end like this.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM