Review Summary: The best thing they've done in almost two decades
I’d practically given up on Melvins. You might have too, after being subjected to clunker after gimmick-driven clunker for 18 years, culminating in the plodding, milquetoast series of farts in a dark room that was
Pinkus Abortion Technician, an album whose two-bass gimmick was so inconsequential, you’d have to be told it existed for it to even register. Since their landmark release in 2006 with
A Senile Animal Melvins fans have waited with an ever-diminishing fervor for something,
anything to provide a worthy followup to that sludge-crusted torque wrench of a career highlight. From some accounts
Working With God represented at least a partial return to form, but represented in reality only an ambiguous commitment to their former quality. Meanwhile, I’d gotten so hopeless about their trajectory that 2022’s
Bad Moon Rising didn’t even register on my radar, and as of this writing still has not been heard by me. That said, unless I visit that album and make the unlikely judgment that it manages to top
Tarantula Heart, I can safely say that only now, after almost 2 decades, Melvins have once again found enough fire in their collective guts to climb back up onto the sludge metal throne.
What sets the album apart from what they’ve churned out the past 18 years is its ability to channel exactly what has always made them great, while injecting a renewed sense of genuine musical creativity that finally sticks it to the tired notion that all they needed to do was play around with a new gimmick. The most attention might end up going to Pain Equals Funny, a nineteen minute marathon that chunks its way around various stretches of musical terrain in what feels inspired enough to go by like it’s half its length. But true highlight status may go to Working The Ditch, a song that sounds as though Melvins picked up exactly where
A Senile Animal left off, a straightforward, pounding grinder of a track that is Melvins at their leanest, and their most essential. To contrast, touch on the inspired weirdness of She’s Got Weird Arms, its ability to sustain its spidery oddball sensibility while drifting daringly towards the edge of the annoying, held together through its clanging lurch of a drunk-waltz drum pattern. It might not quite add up to a career highlight, but, like this album as a whole, it’s as fun and fresh as the gang have sounded in years, a genuine songwriting risk that plays to all of the band’s strengths. If the pounding Allergic to Food doesn’t quite make up in fun what it lacks in substance, its status as filler is only cemented by a repetitiousness that had me checking the time for the first time in the album’s length. And Smiler represents another thoroughly nourishing heaping of meat-and-potatoes Melvins, a track that’s as much of a crunching rip-roarer as Working The Ditch, but with a hair less staying power, in spite of itself.
What
Tarantula Heart represents for Melvins, at the end of everything, is a fresh start, a new look that eschews the half-baked gimmicks of the past few decades and seeks to play around with those familiar tools that have worked so well in unfamiliar ways, namely a bottomless bucket of gut-churning guitar tone reworked into madcap riffs and gargantuan shifts, Buzz’s inimitable bellow across the waves of sludged-up pentatonic roaring and thunderous drumwork. In short, it’s damn-near a complete triumph for Melvins, and handily reaffirms their status as one of the most innovative and influential bands in heavy music. With this on-brand set of oddball glue-huffer riff carnivals, we can safely, and definitively say, Welcome back, Melvins.
