Melvins
Stag (Mammoth/Atlantic)
by Jon Sarre
This is what, Melvins’ ninth release since signing on with a major somewhat late in their three-decade career? (I know that’s not true, but it sure seems that way. How long has it been since “The Year of Grunge?” What year was that, anyway?) By all appearances, Stag documents the moment Dale Crover, Buzz Osbourne, and Mark D. decided their Atlantic deal was not worth the trouble to see through to the end. It’s a contract breaker, in other words. Commercial suicide.
Sure, there are certain tracks which indicate that the boys were at least humoring the record execs. “The Bit” is a full-on play to the Great Unwashed Metal Nation, complete with sitar, which kinda gives the song a Metallicaesque groove. They also oddly pander to the alterno-indie rock types with “Black Bock,” which recalls the (gulp!) Beatles (if George Martin had decided to thoroughly soak their tapes in dish water before mixing them down). There are also a couple of unapologetic full-tilt rockers in “Hide” and “Buck Owens.”
Other than the four songs mentioned above, Melvins drop any and all pretense of playing ball with Atlantic. They give their eccentricities full range and space out all over the place. Someone told me that this record was designed to be played on a variable speed turntable (so you can speed up and slow down each separate track). I guess it’s supposed to make more sense that way. Of course, you can’t do that with a disc player, so it’ll annoy anyone who bought this album on CD that the vocals reach Munchkin disproportions on “Skin Horse” and move slower than a snail’s pace on “Cottonmouth.” It’s a pretty good joke, that’s for sure.
CD player or not, there’s no denying the glorious mess of spacy noise-skronk which are “Goggles,” “Sterilized,” and “Lacrimosa” (which bleeds right off of “Sterilized”). These “tunes” come across like soundtracks to nightmares. The vocals are so fucked with in the mix that they almost sound backwards. “Soup” segues off “Goggles” and utilizes a pling plong kinda dripping beat with layers of moog swirl. It’s sorta like an outtake from the Apocalypse Now soundtrack. There’s also the aforementioned blues parody which is “Cottonmouth,” all locomotive samples and lazy slide guitar with Buttonhole Surfer vocalizations (think “Graveyard” from Locust Abortion Technician). These are the tracks that make Stag the mystifying genre-fuck it is.
The bottom line is that the Melvins have outpunked everyone with this “fuck you” to the board bosses at Warners (how bad was the deal they signed, anyway?). Stag is a weird record, that’s for sure; it’s funny, annoying, and, every once in a while, downright brilliant (or maybe it’s just a downright brilliant snowjob). Regardless, the Melvins aren’t brown-noser Toadies and, anyway, platnumb sales figures aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.
