Clutch - Blast Tyrant. Clutch have only just really clicked for me recently. I used to find them a bit meh but I've been listening to them a lot recently.

Clutch is fucking awesome. I don't need to explain why. They just are.

Yeah. I dunno why I never got on with them before. In theory everything about them is what I would like, but it didn't work. Anyway I'm pleased to say that is no more

I totally love the first pile of things they released, the EPs and the first two full lengths. It sounds like early high school to me. At the time, in my very first band, we wrote a song so similar to Passive Restraints, that we ended up just learning the slight differences and covering the Clutch song instead.

Awfuck, now i have to go dig out some clutch rekkids.

This is the first Clutch song i ever heard, on college radio, right about 1991:



Lovely grinding evil thing, almost closer to industrial than hardcore, which is the scene they found themselves lumped in amongst.

IMO, one of the finest things about the band is just how naturally, the musical shift occurred from their early nearmetal stuff to their modern heavy soulbluesjam sound.

I don't know of any band that i would be able to stick with from point A to point B making a similar transformation. The one resounding theme, and their saving grace i would suppose, is that a strong current of solid rocknroll runs through all of it. So it doesn't seem like they 'sold out' somewhere along the line, or necessarily became a worse band for it.

I prefer the oldest stuff, but i don't find the newest stuff bad at all. Which, considering the huge sonic difference between them, makes for a pretty nifty trick they have pulled off.

Also, when i first heard it, i was for a short spell saddened by the missing/toned-down screaming, but found myself quickly swayed by its space/nautical theme, and fucking ridiculous locked in groove-ness:



That is a fucking laid back hooligan party record. Keeps moving, doesn't get too worked up, never gets sleepy.

Also, quite a nice drumsound across the record. I was wayyy into that bit back then.

It's quite a big shift, but to be fair they turned into a nasty stoner-riff band with utterly bizarre lyrics.

That being said, I've never had an issue with bands making large stylistic shifts- it's gonna happen, we all do it. (Mostly, unless you're Motorhead or something.) Sometimes it's for the better. I liked all the industrial/prog/gothrock elements that filtered into Euro-metal in the late '90s, for example. Rather that than the same old DM-stuff.

I know I don't play the same stuff I did when I was 20. Nor do I want to.

If the music's good, I don't care who's playing it, nor do I care how it relates- if it relates at all- to any of their previous body of work. Is what it is. Do I like the noise or not? But that's my take.

I would like to listen that way, but in a general sense, if i *really* enjoy how a band sounds, that is why i listen to them, not because i like their personalities or whatever.

The side effect of this however, is that if they start doing something else, they may wind up somewhere that i have no use for them to go. Dillinger Escape Plan is a good example of this. So is, in light of their more recent outputs, Radiohead. So is Cynic. What they all had was uniquely interesting to me, where they all went, i have no use for, as there are better sources for the types of sounds they wound up with, respectively: silence, Autechre/Aphex Twin, Kenny G.

I have a wide-ish range of what i am into, but i also perhaps necessarily have a slightly more narrow range of where or from whom, i am interested in hearing it.

I also actually feel like the longer a band is together, generally, the less interesting they get. There are exceptions; Fugazi, The Beatles, for a couple examples, but in my opinion they are far more rare than bands that 'lose it' as they go off in search of new sounds when they get bored of playing/writing together. Different isn't always better. IMO, most bands should fucking break up. I am all for the reforming as new entities, but very few bands can avoid ruining a thing when given the loads of time to think about it, that a longstanding band provides.

Concurred that most bands have a limited shelf life. (Though can and often do go off to do things as individual artists or in different bands that are pretty cool.) Now, the thing is I don't like necessarily where a lot of bands came from, especially heavier bands, who I think are their best often in the middle of their career; I expect them to start off derivative and wind up repetitive with hopefully something awesome or two in between.

I don't really care who it came from; I like some oddball records that are not fan favorites by any stretch. Even of bands I otherwise normally like for what they're known for. And I remember in my more metal days dissing hard a lot of records people said were their best ones- the metalhead/firstalbum-always-bast syndrome.

And some things that I adore just have one or two good records in 'em and that's it (Tomahawk never topped their debut, Isis never came close to Panopticon, Dresden Dolls s/t, etc...) and some wind up their best at the end of their career- Dead Can Dance's Spiritchaser, which I should have memorized by now.

Aside from about an hour of listening to old clutch, i have been listening to the Melvins all day.

I have decided that in the modern era, i simply don't listen to them enough at all.

Also, i didn't realize that they had re-released 8 Songs/10 Songs, as 26 Songs.







In answer to Todge's question from the be my bitch thread, you should do Houdini, and then this record. It is all the early early stuff, pretty much just energetic rock rock, with fucking awesome drumming. It is paced throughout a little more like the tune i poasted in the other thread.

The production quality is a little less burlyslick than what they did later on(though they seem to have cleaned it up a shit ton for this re-release. (These youtube clips are terrible with low quality video/audio compression biz)) but the rock, is rocking.

some pretty wicked doom.

I'm really enjoying Houdini so far. I'm not sure whether I actually got to this one when I first dl'd their discography, there was so much other stuff to get through

They definitely have some weird ones in there that might turn off a first time listener. As time went on, they got more interested in doing random experiments and ambient noise stuff on occasion. The album Prick for instance, don't start there. Probably not Honky either.

But a lot of the later stuff is pretty sweet too. The records they did with the big business doods have certain qualities of nift to them. Two drummers, but in a way that actually sounds like two drummers, not just one sloppy big drummer.

Myself, i like the massiveness of the production on later stuff, but i prefer the songs and pacing of the early stuff. The stuff from 26 Songs and Ozma(the CD version that includes the Gluey Porch Treatments stuff) especially.

For sludge doomy rock Bullhead is the one that named the Japanese band Boris, and when you hear the first song you know exactly how/why that went down. Stoner Witch has some of the early forays into 'nice production' they did, and a lot of just general hard rock. There is at least one song on that one that sounds like it might be a leftover from the Black Album or something, vocals and all...

Eventually, you will simply need to listen to all of everything. That is the way Melvins works.

You just need to start from whatever section you get along with most, and expand out from there. That helps the weird shit make sense. You may not like it still, but it helps to put it in perspective that the oddstuff is just one aspect of a band that has done a lot of different (relatively, it is all Melvins Heavy) shit over the years.

This thread inspired me to put this on:



...and remember how utterly nuts the drumming is on this.

I love the video to this, from that one:

Also, props for outsabbathing sabbath on occasion:

I'm really starting to get into the old, old Fugazi stuff.. There is some seriously sweet and almost metal riffing in this song.. It's like this sluggish chug that is not quite metal but almost..

13 Songs used to be my favourite album but it got overtaken by Red Medicine a while back.

I think End Hits is my favoritefavorite.. It's hard to choose though, I listened to End Hits every day multiple times in Alaska so I have much more time with that album than any other. It is, IMO, songwise the most consistently awesome as fuck.

One thing I have to say I enjoy there, is that it still sounds like a real band, just, like they sound fucking gigantic. Without having three thousand tracks of bullshit either. That's a standout characteristic of a Melvins record- the sounds themselves are simply Quite Very Large Indeed.

The two-drummer shit is all sorts of cool. Makes me wonder why I've not investigated Big Business at all?