Miss Piggy Lunchbox

What are you doing reading this when you could be listening to Girl Talk?

Ho.  Lee.  S**t.

Between their greatest hits, live, collaborative, and 25-year-old-demo releases, it’s sometimes hard to remember that Melvins do hit the studio every few years to release new music as a band. They do, though. They’ve got a new album due out next week, and this one, from 2006, is their first since 2002’s excellent Hostile Ambient Takeover.

For a long time I didn’t consider Melvins one of my favorite bands, my opinion probably overly-colored by my young experience with “Cow” from 1991’s Bullhead, which starts with one slow drum beat for what feels like several minutes. Over the years I’ve grown to appreciate their “one long note” and noisy output, but it’s still not the type of thing you think of as being enjoyable leisurely listening. F**k that, though. There’s way too much awesome, accessible music in their catalog to ignore it any longer. Melvins is my favorite band.

Oh, that feels so good to say. For about 13 years I’ve been describing Mr. Bungle as my favorite band, and they haven’t put out an album for nine years. “You know Faith No More?” my explanation would begin. No longer. I’ll still have to explain to everybody who Melvins is (which is a tragedy in at least two ways), but now I can at least point to a band who is continuing to add to their legacy, and awesomely so. Unless I found out lead singer King Buzzo is some kind of horrible criminal before the birth of my first son, that son will be named after him to honor his contribution to music and the human condition.

You can put A Senile Animal right up near the top of the list as one of Melvins’ best in their extensive discography. It’s a good intro to the band, too, as it’s mostly straight-forward aggressive, thrashy stuff. They’ve put aside the molasses-paced sludge for at least one album in favor of a tight, clean, but still absolutely huge sound. They even implement hand claps on “A History Of Drunks.” Melvins are special because of all of what they are, but when they release an album this accessible and fantastic, to go along with other classics like Houdini, Stoner Witch, and Hostile Ambient Takeover, you can’t help but wondering if I’d have to introduce them to fewer people if they had decided just to be a metal band.

Things get a bit repetitively mundane near the end, starting at about “The Mechanical Bride.” Up until that point, though, this was on a five-lunchbox trajectory. “The Hawk” is the Best Song Ever, and I encourage you to check it out if you’ve ever been curious about Melvins or wonder what all the fuss was about.

Rating:

Mixers: “The Talking Horse,” “Rat-Faced Granny,” “The Hawk,” “You’ve Never Been Right”
Keepers: everything else
Filed Between: Houdini Live—A Live History of Gluttony and Lust and Melvins + Lustmord (Pigs Of The Roman Empire)

I can hardly summarize this album because it keeps ruining my damned narrative. First I was all set to love it because it’s on Ipecac, I liked its predecessor, 2002’s Oceanic, and it was widely regarded as 2004’s best metal album. And then it bored me. But then I really liked it. And then it bored me again, and now I’m digging on it again.

So I clearly have mixed feelings about ISIS’ third album. And since I am currently loving it, as the opening track rolls, let me talk about how I digs it. First and foremost, there is an unprecedented sound here that you simply must hear. It is rich beyond description. It’s so palpable I can wrap my legs around and hump it with the hard-on it gives me. It even humps back. You want to talk about a wall of sound? This is like a wall of sound that keeps Mexican immigrants out of Arizona and Texas, that’s what kind of wall this is. Stoners, rejoice, the ultimate in sonic ecstasy has arrived…the impossible has occurred: Kyuss’ sound has been bested. Welcome to a new era of eargasms, courtesy of ISIS.

And ISIS is clearly targeting stoners here. And if they’re not, they should be, because I have a hunch this sounds literally (yes, literally) boner-inducing good when you hear it stoned. Not only is there that gorgeous, heavy sound with which my ears are experiencing new levels of velvet-wrapped heaviness, but they wield it expertly. There are three- to four-minute stretches of music where they hypnotize you with a slow, repeated riff followed by an absolutely stunning assault on your ears that brings you right back to the present, gasping for breath, trying to remember just how you forgot that life was this damn good.

But sober listening sometimes feels like you’re looking around the room wondering why the stoned kids are so freaking boring. Honestly, I’m totally fine with the minute after minute of unchanging beats and chords followed by slow builds. I can even look past that the slow-start-to-build-to-explode thing gets a little formulaic after a while. It’s when those slow parts get boring that I lose it, though.

The first three tracks on here are easily the best, and really the first two are in a class of their own. Track three’s crazy boring start is clearly the part of the concert where you go get everybody a beer or take a leak (unless you’re stoned, I imagine), and it keeps an otherwise awesome track from being mixed.

And once they hit median track four, “Wills Dissolve,” it goes downhill for a while. They mix it up with a bit of a funky bass…it’s almost like an interlude…except that they forget to come back from their break for “Syndic Calls” and “Altered Course,” only rushing back to finish you off with awesomeness for “Grinning Mouths,” and even that doesn’t achieve awesome until the last several minutes.

Still, the album seizes four lunchboxes in the first two tracks and, despite trying really hard, never quite lets go of them. They also do well enough to seize the title of my New Favorite Band.

Rating:

Mixers: “So Did We,” “Backlit”
Keepers: “In Fiction,” “Wills Dissolve,” “Grinning Mouths”
Non-keepers: ”Syndic Calls,” “Altered Course”
Filed Between: ISIS’ Oceanic and Joe Jackson (Night and Day)

You work so hard to get it done
And then you get it done and what’s the point in that?
Cause when you work so hard you have no fun
And then you have no fun and what’s the point in that?
- “Good Distance”

And so my new fave band shows they have more insight into my life than even I do.

This is awesome. Can I Keep This Pen? leads off with these three women from Long Island rapping about their skills on the mic, gets you to fall in line behind their charge to the top of Mount Awesome, and doesn’t give you a chance to catch your f’ing breath until they reach the top. With every track, you think, “Oh, this is the best one on the record,” and then, while you’re still soaking in its awesomeness just a second after its finished, bam!, they’re back with something even more awesome.

This is so awesome it is killing me to stop rocking my ass off in order to write this post. So I’m just going to knock this s**t out so I can get back to bopping, k? Yeah, you understand.

So, yeah, it’s all here. Killer rhymes, rocking beats, hooks that just…don’t…stop, heroic guitar riffs, and samples integrated right into the damn song, unlike so much rap that finds a sweet bit and plays it 50 times over the course of three minutes to disguise a weak ass song. The sounds are swim-around-in lush. “Iluvitwhenya,” the best song ever about sex with your boyfriend, has two of the album’s best sounds in it: the furriness you can reach out and pet at the climax as well as the ringing guitar power chord early on whose power would make Glenn Danzig blush. This is simultaneously the smartest and most fun rap, and possibly music, I have ever heard. And if you were trying to maximize fun, smart, and rocking all at the same time, your first and last stop is Northern State.

I dare you to go watch their video for “Better Already” and then tell me you don’t love them to death. Also don’t miss the free mp3 for “Away Away,” which is my favorite song by them because it’s the one I’m listening to right now. Also, it’s awesome.

Every rap group should be three women from Long Island. Or maybe every rap group should be Northern State. ‘Tevs…I’m going to get back to listening to these girls sing about my social life.

Everybody’s talking bout getting married
Everybody’s talking bout having babies
Everybody’s talking bout making money
Everybody’s talking bout going to work
- “Cold War”

Rating:

Mixers: “Better Already,” “Away Away,” “Good Distance,” “Iluvitwhenya,” “Sucka Mofo,” “Cold War,” “Things I’ll Do”
Non-keepers: “The Three Amigas”
Filed Between: No Alternative and O Brother, Where Art Thou? Soundtrack

O “Sabotage,” how do I love thee? Let me count the ways. Shall I compare thee to a warm summer’s day? No, I shall think about driving around on a summer day with my windows open and your boisterous refrain blaring from my car. It will be cool, because everybody will be thankful that I am sharing your genius with them. They will think, “Ah, there goes ‘Sabotage,’ the best song ever.” And everybody will have a good day who hears it because such is the power of your awesomeness.

Shall I kiss thee all over thy beautiful parts? The awesomeness lies everywhere in you. It’s in your insistent, siren-esque guitar part, your yearningly passionate screaming vocals, the pure succulent sound of your drums, the perfect layering of your record scratching which actually lies in the song as if it were a more traditional rock music instrument. It’s in your pacing…the way you build from the riff out of silence in the middle of the song and the way you take the song from 10 to 11—no, 12—at the end. It’s the way you found the perfect everything and then kept it to three minutes, leaving me always panting, wanting more. “Sabotage,” will you marry me?

I can’t live without you. I need you. I think about you day and night and when I’m not with you I’m sad and when I’m with you I’m happy. Aw geez, I must sound so silly, but when it feels so right, who cares how silly I sound. I’m sorry it took me 14 years to really get to know you. I mean I always knew about you and knew you were pretty cool. But it’s just now I’m beginning to feel these urges in places that I didn’t know I had. “Sabotage,” you and I got a lot of lost time to make up for. Think of all the things we’ve done in the last 14 years that we haven’t done together. There’s so much I want to share with you: walking, running, driving. F**k, I might take up smoking again, just because I never really got to do that with you. “Sab,”…can I call you “Sab?”…will you take it up the ass? That’s how hard you make me.

And that’s how hard you make this album, which you almost single-handedly take to four-and-a-half lunchboxes. Also, there are 19 other songs on here of varying quality.

Fin.

Okay, that’s not fair. I mean, “Sabotage” does dwarf the rest of this album, but there is actually a lot worth mentioning here outside of the superlative sixth track. If I can just keep my mind off of “Sabotage” and my peter out of its sonic mouth for a few minutes I’ll be able to tell you about them, too.

First of all, there’s “Sabotage” (Damn it, KEN, concentrate…).

Okay, so for real now. The sound on this album is incredible. And I don’t just mean that the sound quality is pristine, which it is, but I mean the actual timbre of every little sound on here is amazing. You can tell that an incredible amount of effort was put into just getting things to sound right, like they cared as much about every individual hertz of sampling on this CD as they did about how they sounded sequentially.

I also really appreciate the adventure of this disc. The Beasties move even farther beyond the boundaries they were stretching on Check Your Head two years earlier. They showcase their versatility by including some avant-garde violin, excellent funk keyboard work throughout, and even a couple of pretty damn legit thrash songs, particularly “Tough Guy.” They’ve even got what have to be the Gyoto monks sampled on a couple of songs. The most impressive part of that is that they actually integrate them into the rest of the song, instead of just using it as some exotic intro to their part.

The only real downside is that the rhymes tend to be weak. There’s too much boasting and name-checking. I know, I know: ”KEN, that’s kind of what hip hop is,” I can hear you say. But these name checks are forced beyond comfort. It’s as if they felt they needed a very high name-check to minute ratio and freaked out if it dropped below that. When they drop groaners like “I’ve got Attractions like Elvis Costello” all over the place, it tends to lose it’s zazz.

Is that enough? Good, ‘cuz now I wanna tell you ‘bout my girl “Sabotage”….

Rating:

Mixers: “Sure Shot,” “Tough Guy,” “Bobo on the Corner,” “Sabotage,” “Get It Together,” “Eugene’s Lament,” “Bodhisattva Vow,” “Transitions”
Non-keepers: “Do It”
Filed Between: Check Your Head and The Beatles (Help!)