ALBUM REVIEW: Working With God – Melvins

February 24, 2021 Matthew Tilt

Irreverent grunge/sludge legends the MELVINS make no bones about having a good time on Working With God. From the daft promises to get right with the lord, to statements that GREEN DAY wouldn’t have the balls to make an album like this and their foul-mouthed BEACH BOYS reworking I Fuck Around, this album sees the 1983 line-up of Buzz Osbourne, Dale Crover and Mike Dillard let loose with their wackiest, heaviest ideas.

It’s a belated follow up to Tres Cabrones, an album which, as impossible as it sounds, was more bizarre and off-the-cuff than this. Working With God might actually be the start of a distinctive MELVINS 1983 sound, although what that is, is still hard to say. As such Working With God sometimes feels like a compilation, rather than a cohesive work. Silly non-sequiturs pepper the album, such as 1 Brian, The Horse-Faced Goon and Fuck You. Stylistically it runs through the multiple styles that the MELVINS have adopted throughout their career, from sludge and grunge, all the way through to proto-thrash.

Take Boy Mike, which is a fast-paced, riff fuelled thrill ride, hitting the listener straight after Brian, The Horse-Faced Goon, which sounds like GWAR collaborating with GREEN JELLY. 1 Fuck You wouldn’t be out of place on a late-nineties rock radio grunge album, even as it descends into childish expletives.

It’s not just the variations in genre. The placement on the album is purposefully disorientating, like dropping the Houdini-style Negative No No straight after the surf-rock BEACH BOYS cover. If you were to produce a ‘Where To Start With the MELVINS’ list, Working With God would be for completionists only, not because of a lack of quality, but because the band have deliberately thrown everything at the wall and recorded the results.

How can you complain though? This is a band that has consistently shrugged off expectations and forged their own path, to the point where Working With God is exactly the sort of album we should be expecting. For a band fast approaching 40 years in the business, the MELVINS continue to surprise. And when you think you’ve got your head around the album, it closes on Good Night Sweetheart. Which starts with audio distortion and chants, and ends with a crooning melody.

It’s a masterpiece in contradiction. Showing the band to be as imaginative as ever, even if the quality dips at times. The constant innovation from the band – both in this iteration, in the standard MELVINS line-up and with the MELVINS LITE project – makes it hard to keep up and this album is further proof of that. But that’s the idea and adds further credence to the theory that these oddball noisemongers are the only band with the balls to make an album like Working With God. If you don’t like it, you don’t get the joke. And the MELVINS don’t care anyway.

Rating: 7/10

Working With God is set for release February 26th via Ipecac Recordings.

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