Review Summary: There will, fleetingly, be fireworks.
It should be an event of great reverence whenever your favourite band's favourite band's favourite band [the] Melvins release an album. Instead, something to the tune of 29 LPs in, good will has been stretched to expectation-limiting limits, leaving fans wondering whether the band's exemplary habit of doing whatever makes them happy could conceivably result in a release more focused and refined than their last couple of caveat-laden returns to form. Well,
Thunderball at least makes for an exception on account of it technically being just the third Melvins 1983 album (an edition of Melvins comprising of OG members King Buzzo and Mike Dillard), whilst being their first record made in conjunction with murky noise aficionado Ni Maîtres and slightly noisier noise aficionado Void Manes. Interesting as this all is, keeping up with these affairs of personnel is a lot to ask of a modestly-sized brigade of fans who I suspect might be responsible for history's stickiest mosh pit.
Whether any of this concerns you or not,
Thunderball swiftly sticks any preliminary thoughts you've had about it up your arse. The uptempo rollicking rock of “King of Rome” drops us into some vintage Melvins chuggery to open the album, but forms a disjointed drunken one-two punch with the brief and fiddly interlude of “Vomit of Clarity”, which introduces our new knob-twiddling compatriots into the mix in a clash of first impressions, like spilling a well-stanked IPA all over a fellow Melvins fan one song into a live set you'd both been hotly anticipating. Fortunately, stoner dads are an inherently forgiving bunch, and the recently sodden victim will likely suck the beer right out of his plaid shirt, and you'll quickly bond over the fact that you share literally every hobby that they have in common.
In order to make comparable amends, Melvins rip into “Short Hair With A Wig” with the measured trudge and weighty riffing they perfected literal musical generations ago, only this time the two atmospheric noise fullaz decide to twiddle their knobs as the band plays, and the essential chemistry of the release finally results in bespoke fireworks. I say finally — in truth it just feels a long six minutes before things go from awkwardly good to decently great.
“Victory of the Pyramids” pushes this greatness further stlll by brandishing an unusually gauche flavour of formal fuckery — it isn't so much one song as it is three songs grafted together with gluey porch treatments I daren't contemplate for long. It begins with what sounds like a bridge or an outro for a song that never started, and repeats in a woozy spiral for a couple of minutes before pulling the plug on the whole endeavour and starting another section in a faster tempo and a different key. This section is buried after a mere minute, and quickly exhumed in the guise of a filthy plodding wall of doom which unveils itself with a patience hitherto undreamable within the confines of the track, slowly broiling noise manipulation notwithstanding. The whole thing is a gloriously slapdash stab at being audacious, functioning perfectly well in its refusal to function at all. It is impish mirth incarnate, and any superlatives I throw at it almost feel unearned; let their absence act as a hearty commendation.
"Venus Blood" is another treat for low heart rates, a filthy crawl delivered with a touch of restraint, muzzling guitars that have elsewhere punched and roared, demonstrating a career-long mastery of tone with a menacing snarl worthy of their many hypnotising repetitions. Then Melvins basically just fuck off before you've even begun to ready your crusty cap for a well-deserved doffing. While it's usually tactful to leave an audience wanting more, particularly when your band formed when the Cold War was a hot conflict,
Thunderball would greatly benefit from another 10 or 20 minutes worth of mid-to-low tempo grooves to grant their now-besotted audience a chance to sway like sluggish Evangelicals in a primal stupor. Or, fuck it, I could even do with another sophomoric transmogrification of a Beach Boys classic. Ah well. There's always next year.
