Melvins - Nude With Boots (Ipecac)
5/5
By: Charlie Potter
BUY MERCHThe first Melvins album I ever purchased, I purchased about 7 years ago. That album was 2001's Electroretard. It took me a while to get into; I was young and it is a weird album, but eventually I fell under its spell and was elated every time I put it on, so much so that I decided to delve a little further. I got The Crybaby, which also required a bit of effort - it's a really long, strange album that sounded nothing like Electroretard. Each album I have bought has been different and quite hard to get used to, but with each one I've learnt something new. Eventually I have stopped being so surprised when I hear a new album and find it hard to get into, I have now come to accept it, so much so that the Melvins could put out anything and I would assume it was brilliant and have a good go at it, probably ending up holding it in very high esteem. This approach has been pushed pretty far on albums like Prick, but even there the Melvins have come up trumps and taught me a few valuable lessons.
You may think that I am a fool for having such a blind faith in a band, but I would say to you that trust is one of the most important factors in negotiating one's way around the masses of music out there, trust in bands, trust in labels, trust in magazines, trust in Rockfeedback. I trust the Melvins. I love the Melvins. I need the Melvins. Dependency is a beautiful thing folks, I depend on the Melvins like you might depend on your family. If you think that you might get a bad review of this album, then I ask you, you wouldn't give your family a bad review would you? The fact that this is an incredible album makes my job easy - go out and buy this record, it's in the shops, you idiot!
And though it's tempting to guide you through Nude With Boots track by track from beginning to end, that would be wrong and boring. Which this certainly isn't. The one thing that I really hoped for was that it had a totally different structure to the last Melvins album (A) Senile Animal and I very much got my wish. Don't get me wrong (don't), I love the structure to (A) Senile Animal, I just thought they were in danger of becoming a bit too normal. That last record sort of eases you in, and all the tracks purposefully flow in together, leaving most of the less in your face bits to the end (though there are a couple at the beginning). This album has lots more in the way of hidden flourishes and contrasting tracks.
The most unusual feature to Nude With Boots is a monolithic 7-minute slow chugger named 'Dog Island'. This is a really special track in which the Melvins show that you can be massively heavy whilst still being very restrained. It starts with an incredible punch from all four musicians and then from there just confidently chugs along slowly building up to its climax, by which time the government has been over thrown and peace has been brought to the many, and tears have been brought to the few.
Throughout the record the band show that they have a vast array of classic rock styles right at their finger tips. There is an obvious comparison to be made with Led Zeppelin in the first track 'The Kicking Machine' (which you can download from this very site HERE), and you can definitely hear Buzz's love of Kiss coming through throughout the record, albeit filtered though it is through a broad knowledge of early punk, this provides a whole bunch of really fun moments, the likes of which the Melvins have never really taken this far before, there are many points when the band will use these classic sounds and put them into their bonkers song structures with startling effects.
But as well as showing a playful well observed approach to established styles the Melvins show quite clearly their own weighty influence on a lot of sounds that are very popular at the moment, sounds they can do easily and add so much more to. On tracks like 'Dies Irae', the Melvins achieve a similar low resonant droning heavy sound that a band like Sunno))) or Boris would muster up and then proceed to take it a direction that you would never have the luxury of or find the capacity for within those bands. Unfortunately it never pays to be ahead of your time, which is why the Melvins are only just beginning to get the credit that they deserve now.
'Dies Irae' has a very important role in the structure of Nude With Boots as a whole, as it manages to sort of lose your attention - everything is so hidden by stretches of droning noise that it takes a while to notice that it has some brilliant melodies in there. The Melvins then cleverly put a really exciting track just after it, and it's only about a minute in when you think to yourself 'hang on, where did this come from? Where am I? Who's that in my kitchen..?' The album is pocketed with these interesting little sonic noodlings, an ear meal of pings and scrapes and beeps.
One of the best facets of the record is the heavy presence of Dale's vocals. He adds a much broader dynamic to the sound with his grungy, sleazy vocal chords allowing the Melvins to much more quickly take a completely different direction if they feel like doing so. This is also true of the guitar sounds; Buzz is using a much wider range of guitar sounds than usual which makes good use of a very mature palette that the guy has been working away on for years. The production does take a little longer to get used to however, it's not bad, it's just that it's ultra thick, quite compressed, and at the same time quite flat in tone. Long time Melvins fans will know that certainly where Dale's drums are concerned a very dull papery slap makes the sound all the more exciting in the long run, only now a similar sort of feel has been transferred to the guitar which gives an overall hard weightiness like meat being hit with a tenderiser.
I am quite intrigued by the writing process used here. Usually most of the songs will have been floating around for years, in the realms of tape demos that Buzz has been squirreling away over the years, but there is so much Jarred and Coady on here that I get the feeling that a lot of the material may have been written much more recently. But there is still the referencing of other Melvins tracks that we saw on the last album, particularly the song 'Suicide in Progress', the breakdown in which is very reminiscent of 'The Bloated Pope' from their 2005 album with Lustmord, Pigs of the Roman Empire. This gives an interesting insight into Buzz's writing process, in that if he likes a riff he will try it out in various different compositions changing the tone of both the riff and the song. I enjoy the way that he hasn't tried to cover this up and has been quite honest about what it is he does.
For the last couple of weeks the Melvins have been like a twice a day tablet for me. There are loads of really good bits that I could talk about on this album but there really is no point in ruining the fun of finding them for yourself. Overall, Nude With Boots has even further strengthened my faith that my favourite band in the world are in fact also the best band in the world.
As for the mark out of five, easily...
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