Since 1986, notorious Pacific Northwest spawn the Melvins have been slogging their distinctive metal/punk/noise/sludge mutation around the nation. So retro, yet so guileless is their approach, that the Melvins are virtually avant-garde — a charmingly feisty train-wreck of Black Sabbath’s doom-laden heaviness, and dalliances with the dissonance of the Stooges and Swans. Inspired by their appearance at the UK festival All Tomorrow’s Parties — wherein performers are asked to present an album of theirs in its entirety — the Melvins have “redone” their 1993 album Houdini, though this go-’round was recorded for an invited audience in a warehouse in Vernon, California. The fine opus concludes with the thirteen-minute “Spread Eagle Beagle,” a relentless exercise in Philip Glass- and trance-type minimalism, with an inexorable chain-gang-in-hell drum pattern and serrated sounds swelling and fading like nightmares and bad memories.
.The Melvins
Houdini Live 2005 A Live History of Gluttony and Lust