ALBUM REVIEW: Thunderball – Melvins

It would be really easy for Buzz Osborne to churn out a generic MELVINS record and collect his royalties at this stage of his career. Keep the payments ticking over, you know, to pull something cheap. Where’s the fun in that, his track record doesn’t indicate he’d do that, but anybody can decide to do something for the sake of it, or because it’s easy to. But, is there any such thing as a generic MELVINS record? The grungy, sludgy, experimental mess of a band has had more members than you could shake a stick at — making for a unique sound each time round. Their modular structure has consistently adjusted their fluidity, and that’s no different for the new record Thunderball.

Whilst it has a brooding atmosphere overall, there’s plenty of sounds that will surprise you and subvert the expectation that is created by gloomy sludginess. King Of Rome opens with a riff with a fury at its core but keeps a tempered composure, and the overall of the track effect might end up resulting in a satisfying hard-rock, but that’s not what Thunderball becomes at all.

The collaboration with Ni Maîtres and Void Manes takes centre stage during tracks like Vomit Of Clarity and Short Hair With A Wig. The record is polluted with Void Manes weird computing noise and corrupted digital vocals that shoot eerie chords through you, becoming the number one killer of grunge bands: experimental noise. Aside from the sounds of downloading viruses, Ni Maîtres delivers gloriously deep upright bass work for Short Hair With A Wig. Delivering all things doom, a harbinger of evil riffs, the combined efforts of an unlikely collaboration leads you wading through a black sea of sonics. Careful, you could step in the mud of Short Hair With A Wig and lose your boots in the process.

Victory Of The Pyramids offers some respite with riffs radiating a golden light, something that feels idyllic against the surrounding melancholy, the rapturous intro is short lived before being infected by the aforementioned digital sickness that begins permeating across tracks. It turns it from being any old record that could’ve been pumped out, into a sonic storytelling experience, one of a sadistic doom-ridden infection that will not break the hypnotic hold it has over you. 

While only being five tracks long, still 35 minutes, you’re left full and satisfied when you finish sinking as far as you can into the gloopy disorder of Thunderball. Will some people be left expecting a little more variety, some condiments to brighten the main courses? Sure. But, you’ve not been robbed by Osborne of another great record, despite it being an invention that is comparably as wild as his own hair. 

Rating: 7/10

Thunderball is out now via Ipecac Recordings.

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