Rating:
Genre:
Rock
Release Date: 09/21/1993
To essay a concise, surefooted summation of
the Melvins' catalog would be reductive at best, and laughable at worst. This is, of course, underground
rock's trio of pranksters -- unpredictable and capable of complete musical about-faces in the turn of a measure. That said,
Houdini is about as close as one gets to a representative
Melvins album, and it vividly captures the band's unreconstructed power, vision, and musical strangeness. During the early-'90s purge of
hair rock and candy-footed
funk metal,
the Melvins, as with many other acts, seemed fair game for a major label in search of another post-
Nirvana gold mine. With
Kurt Cobain's assistance, the band was snatched up -- and summarily dropped (after three brilliant albums, this being the first) -- by
Atlantic. Though
Houdini's immediate predecessors,
Eggnog and
Bullhead, pried open a few screwball chasms in
the Melvins' syrupy distillation of
Sabbath riffage and
Flipper's noisy anti-
punk, it was this album that displayed the full fruition of the outfit's sonic breadth, from the cough-syrup river drag of
"Night Goat" to the revved-up
"Honey Bucket," and from the creepy
"Joan of Arc" to the glue-damaged
"Sky Pup." Ringleader
King Buzzo's riffs are stretched -- taffy-like -- to meltdown, and at other times they are razor sharp. Either way, they abound with a lumbering, lurching power. With their voluminous output and determination to continuously expand their sound regardless of musical trends,
the Melvins oeuvre has begun to rival -- at least on paper -- the career arcs of
Frank Zappa and
Neil Young.
~Patrick Kennedy, All Music Guide
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