The Melvins / Deerhoof / Part Chimp - London Koko - 4/10/05
5/5
By: Thomas Hannan
In days of ringtones and digital downloads enabling you to lazily only choose the tracks from an LP you initially crave, the time is just right for a celebration of the album. These are proper albums, too - ones where every track is worthy, ones which flow as a lucid body of work. They're made by people who actually care.
Towards the end of the ludicrously fine Don't Look Back season we get the Melvins pummelling through their most archetypal work, the all-singing, all-headbanging exercise in slimy rock and roll that is 'Houdini'. It's anything but note-perfect. Conversely, it actually is perfect.
Part Chimp and Deerhoof are attached to the bill not as unwelcome hangers on but the perfect compliment to the main feature. You get a proper night out. The first thing that hits you about The Chimp, as they'd probably punch you for calling them, is the sheer volume. It takes a while to figure out what they're playing, or if they're actually playing anything (for all you know, they could just be hurting you), because of just quite how loud this is. A few minutes (that long, yes) in and notes start to happen, words start to form, and they're predictably brutal. Guitars really can make almost any sound in the world, you know. Here, they're used to recall earthquakes, and when everything transcends the mire for a few seconds of extreme speed, the power of it is formidable. Well, you think - that certainly cleared the air.
Where Part Chimp were deafening, Deerhoof seem decidedly delicate, even stripping things back to a gentle drum accompaniment for the intermittent occasions when their charming pipsqueak singer decides to treat us to the content of her lungs. They can actually be quite a loud band too, but they're too pretty to worry your ears, too eccentric to try anything other than to entertain them. They're all over the place, waving hands and shaking frames, but the parts when oddball riffs jump from that confusion are enough to get hairs standing to attention and feet rhythmically moving up from and then down towards the sticky floor. The closed-minded metallers who heckle them are idiots, and should be harmed.
That anyone ever believed the Melvins would follow the rules of this little shindig was slightly foolish. You expect 'Houdini'. Of course, Kurt Cobain's not around to strum the guitar on it, but there are other rules to be adhered to. But the Melvins, play the album? In order? As it is on the CD? You're having a laugh. They start with 'Pearl Bomb'. It's track twelve. And the bassline is played on a guitar, not on its instrument of origin. At this point we wonder whether they'll actually get through the whole thing, or get lost in something else and go off on a complete tangent. They're playing with us, the jokers, with their stupid hair and their dresses and their gongs. And their wonderful music - which is no laughing matter.
That they can look so stupid and actually be geniuses only bothers you for a while, before you throw yourself in to the process of nodding your head rather extremely along to what you only now realise is an astounding album. That it isn't played in order actually adds a little surprise to proceedings - you still know what's coming, you just don't know when it'll turn up. How exciting. They do it all, in versions that fit the evening rather than the template set on the hard copy, which essentially means everything is heavier, faster and benefits from the intensity of being able to stare into Buzz Osbourne's beady eyes as he delivers it. Dale Crover proves himself to be one of the greatest drummers since time began; a master of both chaotic hammering and the power of negative space. The new guy on the bass - Kevin Rutmanis became the fifty-ninth Melvins bassist to get the sack a few months back, and bizarrely it was actually Shirley Temple's daughter who played on the original LP - is Mr. Bungle's Trevor Dunn, putting in an enthusiastic if hardly flamboyant performance. Whether he gets to keep his job for long is a bit of a mystery, as even a man with his credentials looks a little too fresh-faced to be this particular outfit's man responsible for lower-end frequencies, but regardless - the boy did good.
Yet never mind those who played it, the songs were monster-cool - 'Night Goat' probably the unhurried, painfully weighty peak, 'Hooch' the obligatory heads-down rock beast and 'Spread Eagle Beagle' a week-long, three-drummer onslaught of hypnotic proportions. And so watching the Melvins tonight has been like exploring 'Houdini', if only on shuffle play, and luckily for us, with some corking bonus tracks taking in some of the MC5 and an awesome rendition of 'Sacrifice' (which can be found on 'Lysol' if you so desire, which you should). Like everything they ever do, boundaries couldn't have been rigorously enforced on it, nor praise heaped upon the event enough.
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