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melvins, "gluey porch treatments" & "colossus of destiny
Since signing to Mike Patton's label Ipecac, The Melvins have gone high concept, releasing a trilogy of albums with a unifying concept. With 'Gluey Porch Treatments' they've gone back to their beginnings and re-released their 1986 record with the garage demos for the record appended as bonus tracks to the album proper. This brings playing time for the album from 38 minutes to a little over an hour, but it doesn't come out as gratuitous, rather as a nice gesture for those interested in how the songs originally started out and how they changed into the final album versions.Some changes are drastic, full blown songs reduced to just a couple of riffs to segue between songs, or used as intros to other songs, other songs expanded into longer tracks, some of the demo intro riffs made into their own songs. The sound quality of the demo material is at times poor, especially in the drum sounds and the sometimes tinny mix, but it's not unlistenable. At times the guitar riffing recalls a more punkish Black Sabbath while Buzz's vocals are often shouted out murkily from under the weight of the music's punk attitude, this is proto-grunge from before grunge was a recognized 'genre' of rock music. The album's liner notes are an essay by Buzz which comes off as a kind of Tom-Waits-story-with-no-point about the scene and how the band has gotten to where they have, and leaves you feeling like you've just heard an old road story about way back when they were starting out.
 
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Colossus of Destiny, on the other hand, is The Melvins newest release, an hour-long track of a live performance in 1998. The sound quality is excellent, and the album is, even by Melvins standards, wierd. The Melvins have been known to try to mess with conceptions of how things should be, even in live sets, by playing the same song twice in a row, or by playing the same note for 15 minutes (in response to a critic who complained that their live show was like that.) Happily, this live track is nothing like that, although it is just as challenging. The record starts off with feedback and oscillating buzzing sounds bouncing from nowhere, with snatches of people saying unintelligble phrases just off the edge of hearing, like a TV at low volume in the next room. At times, the wierd beeps and blips and distorted clangs meld into one another to make a strange combination of noise not unlike Nurse With Wounds' noise-soundscapes -- think 'Homotopy for Marie' with a TV on.
At times claustrophobically noisy and sometimes sparsely ambient, the length of the recording is ultimately it's greatest asset, bludgeoning the listener with it's intentional confusion, a relentless miasma of pulsing ambient noise, ending with a punishing mix of guitars and feedback.
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