The Melvins — A Walk With Love and Death
For all the simple and primal aggression of its title, “Death” opens on two remarkably subdued and calm notes. Both “Black Heath” and “Sober-dellic” occupy the quieter end of the Melvins song spectrum; both delve into the sort of creepy pop atmospherics first explored on “Isobel,” off of King Buzzo’s solo EP from decades back, and neither track would sound out of place on the Melvins Lite album released a few years prior. It’s a bit of slow start, but it does serve as an example of the Melvins’ expectation-defying approach to their work, an approach that more or less defines “A Walk With Love and Death.”
Things head into a much sludgier direction on “Euthanasia,” the album’s third track, and one quite familiar to most Melvins fans; its re-recorded appearance on “Death” is, to me, the album’s greatest mystery. Originally recorded during the “Bullhead” sessions in 1991, the track was ultimately left off that album and found its way onto one of Minneapolis label Amphetamine Reptile’s ‘Dope, Guns, and Fucking In The Streets” compilations; the song has since been re-released as a hyper-limited AmRep seven inch, and has found its way into many of the Melvins’ live sets over the last few years. The new version on “Death” doesn’t change a lot from the original 1991 recording save for adding an orgy of dueling Slayer-esque guitar leads at the end (which are admittedly awesome), and it lacks a bit of the crude, overly-reverbed heaviness that defined the song’s earlier incarnation. It’s a crushing, classic Melvins composition, but I just don’t understand its inclusion here.
“Euthanasia” represents “Death”’s apex of heaviness; the remaining songs strike me as continuations of the sort of “post-sludge” songwriting that defined the four McDonald tracks on “Basses Loaded.” “What’s Wrong With You” (which features Dale on lead vocals), “Edgar The Elephant,” “Christ Hammer,” and “Cactus Party” are all pretty unabashedly straightforward – for the Melvins, anyway – stabs at a cleaner and more mathpop-influenced approach, with myriad choral vocals from all three members that demonstrate a melodic sensibility that’s remained mostly hidden deep in the back end of the band’s oeuvre. The distortion is dialed down and the brute heft of Buzzo’s riffs are traded in for a much more precise and subtly technical direction. Buzzo remains an astonishing and vastly underrated guitarist – some of his work on “Death” is as head-spinning as it’s ever been, reminding me of the more insane chromatic sections of “We All Love JUDY” (off of “The Maggot”) and “Magic Pig Detective” (off of “Stoner Witch”) – and on “Flaming Creature” he falls back into the more metallicized, lightning-fast cold riffing deployed on “Basses Loaded”’s “Hideous Woman” and “War Pussy,” but for the most part the sound across “Death” is lean and warm. The album’s final track, “Cardboa Negro,” ends in a small maelstrom of distant and displaced drumming and far-away swarms of guitar noise, opening the door for the all-in weirdness of “Love.”
“Love” is the sort of genre-defying (despising?) exercise in noise and avant-garde composition that consistently draws the ire of more casual Melvins fans. For me, their “noise” albums (“Prick,” “Honky,” “Colossus of Destiny”) remain high points in the band’s catalogue that deeply reward repeated listenings, showcasing the depth of their tendency toward open experimentation and their collective mastery at arranging disparate and bizarre sounds. I have not seen the film that “Love” serves as the score for, so I can’t comment on its success in that regard, but as a stand-alone Melvins record, it’s pretty fucking phenomenal. Describing it seems almost pointless, as there is so much going on across the album’s fourteen tracks that I feel I’ll be finding new sounds in it 10 years from now. The closest approximation of the sound that I can arrive at is a comparison to the four Throbbing Gristle covers the band have done over the years; those covers point towards the Melvins’ willingness to step far past expectations and simply embrace sound as an entity separate from any sort of “musical” conceptualization. Guitars, drums, and bass are certainly present across “Love” but they’re all deployed in far more formless ways and buried amongst all manner of synthesizer burbles and sound-collages of odd, somewhat creepy/frightening dialogue snippets and audio samples, becoming methods for conveying a lack of structure and an expansive compositional openness, rather than functioning as borders and guides for a more obvious and traditional song-oriented approach.
As with all of the Melvins “noise” albums, there are a couple of “actual” songs tossed into the mix. Both “Give It To Me” and “Scooba” are riffs on 50’s style pop and jazz-combo improvisation; they’re also the place where Steven McDonald’s presence and influence is most strongly brought to bear. Both numbers remind me more than a little bit of Redd Kross’s slop-pop rock n’roll throwbacks, and they fit in smashingly with the Melvins’ penchant for irreverence and sonic playfulness. They serve as brief bits of respite in “Love”’s sequencing, welling up out of the wipeout of aural goop like knives in the dark, slashing ineffectually, but blindly and joyously, away at the tower of disorienting noise and collage the Melvins have erected.
Taken as a package, “A Walk With Love and Death” is more than a worthy addition to the Melvins discography. “Death” is a perfectly serviceable (if not mind-blowing or overtly heavy) modern era Melvins album, while “Love” is a serious high point that ranks with the band’s best contemporary work, serving as a challenging and richly rewarding series of experiments, as well as a reminder of the band’s willingness to push themselves and their fans in pursuit of creativity. The Melvins still do whatever the fuck they want to do without regard for an audience; there is little else that I could ask from any band, and that’s why I’ll follow the Melvins wherever they want to go.