Melvins + Lustmord: Pigs Of The Roman Empire
Don’t let the absence of mix CD candidates fool you, this is an incredible album. It’s just that it requires a special type of listening, and that’s why there are so few keepers, as well.
This is definitely not a Melvins starter album. Sure, Melvins are there cranking out their sludgy riffs of power as they always are, and yeah, the weird-noises element is pervasive through these 60 minutes, but this time the sonic experiments are done by Lustmord, who is credited as writing all of the songs with Buzz as well as with “sound design, programming and [sic] production.” In fact, I would almost call this more of a Lustmord album, where he is painting a sonic picture using newly-composed Melvins riffs as his palette.
Lustmord has worked with Tool and Isis, and Wikipedia credits him with often being credited for creating the dark ambient genre. In fact, one of the best sonic descriptions I can find for this disc is in that same Wikipedia article: “His treatments of acoustic phenomena encased in digitally expanded bass rumbles have a dark ambient quality.” Yep, that just about sums it up.
Here’s how. Melvins don’t really reach for any new compositional frontiers here. Instead, for the most part, they anchor the tracks with riffs that sound like they would have fit right into their catalog from 10 years prior. Then they hand them off to Lustmord who makes them interesting and probably unlistenable to most ears. There are loads of things that sound like they could be sound effects throughout: gongs, huge bells, thunder, foghorns; the entirety of “III” would fit right in as the score to a horror film. One of the most intriguing soundplays, though, is what Lustmord does to the actual Melvins riffs, by making them fade in and out and move closer and farther away. “Pink Bat” features only the very highest frequencies of the drum kit at the beginning.
The centerpiece of the album is the 22-minute title track. It’s pure ambience and foghorns for the first six minutes, at which point a guitar riff enters very far away. With each repetition, it gets gradually closer until finally fading out. There’s a very brief break, and when the guitar re-enters, it is significantly closer than where it was before. It’s one of the spookiest, most surreal things I’ve ever heard, and it’s not even all that complicated or weird…it just sounds awesome.
I’m willing to bet chemicals help make it sound pants-wettingly phenomenal, and I can tell you that it does sound better at high volumes. Which is great, because when everything sounds far away, you turn the volume up, and by the time the instruments are on top of you, they almost literally knock you off your chair. And if I’m going to be knocked off my chair, I want it to be by awesomeness.
As I said before, the tunes crunched out by the band aren’t their highest caliber, but they’re still pretty darn good. Melvins have been doing so well for so long, that I keep waiting for them to fall off the talent cliff. With every listen, I’m skeptical that they can continue to add to their impressive resume, and when I first listened, I was walking around like Beavis and Butt-head, chanting their riffs: “duh duh duh da da da da da da jzzzh jzzzhh jzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzh!” And just about the time I started to realize I’d heard this before, only better, is when I really started to hear what Lustmord was doing with these tracks.
This is one of the best sounding, most interesting collections of music I have ever heard It is mind-blowingly unique, and while I can’t promise you’ll like it, you’ll be missing out on what music in the early 21st century has to offer if you let this one pass you by.
Rating:
Keepers: “The Bloated Pope,” “Pigs Of The Roman Empire,” “Pink Bat,” “Safety Third”
Filed Between: Melvins (Houdini Live—A Live History Of Gluttony And Lust) and Mercury New Music Sampler
Tags: 2004, 4 lunchboxes, CD reviews, music, Seattle, weather