Mudhoney are a constant in a changing world. When they first burst into our consciousness 30 years ago, few would have put their mortgage on the band’s longevity. They were an urgent burst of punk-fuelled grunge: sprawling, exciting and comfortably dumb.
Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s four albums all centre around off-kilter pop and flirtations with distortion; their latest LP, Sex & Food, carries this tradition forwards in a more laid-back manner. Their current European tour in support of the album seems to have lined up nicely with the schedules of American acts Deerhunter, Black Lips and Sam Evian (as well as much-hyped British act Boy Azooga), with all five artists descending on the Albert Hall in Manchester for the six-hour Strange Waves III.
For some a lack of development is failure; not for Kim Deal. Her songwriting and voice have influenced hordes of indie bands from the Eighties until now – indeed the “angular” clang and arch drawl of bands indebted to Pixies, and The Breeders, her band with sister Kelly, is as great a cliché as blues licks were in the Sixties and Seventies. Yet still, on this reunion album for The Breeders' 1993 lineup, the voice, sound and structures remain utterly distinctive and gloriously alien, a world away from the imitators, just as they shone out as different from all around them during The Breeders' greatest success in the grunge years.
Like all The Breeders' albums, this is short, as are the songs: 12 of them in 34 minutes. Yet each takes you places within its structure. There are obvious festival anthems, like the high-speed “Wait in the Car” with its stop-starts and “woah-oh woah-oh”s, and “MetaGoth” which almost sounds like a conscious Pixies nod with its one-note basslines playing off detuned Duane Eddy surf twang and shrieking lead guitar. But these are full of lyrical puzzles, snappy twists and odd tuning that could only be this band: nothing is obvious.
And when things brood, it's not like the slightly fuzzy drift of the last Breeders album Mountain Battles (2008): everything on “Walking with the Killer” and “Blues at the Acropolis” fairly crackles with energy and invention, and delight in the hum and buzz from misusing guitars and amplification, always in the pursuit of that ever-present strangeness. Lyrics are terse, full of repeated phrases, but every so often throwing up something eerily evocative like “junkies of the world lay across the monuments” or “I polish my scales and get nearer and nearer”. The title makes absolute sense: this feels like the work of people open to every sensation, all edges sharp, everything new and unfamiliar, even as they make no attempt to escape the sound they created all those years ago – a bit like John Peel said of the late Mark E Smith and The Fall: “always different; they are always the same.”
Overleaf: watch the reunited Breeders play 1993's 'Drivin' on 9'
As well as creating a true American musical phenomenon, led by from the front by Nirvana, the early-to-mid-Nineties grunge explosion opened a window of opportunity for multitudes of bands on its furthest fringes. South Carolina punk-metallers Corrosion of Conformity hit a career peak at the time, mingling an old-school hard rock sound with something bluesier and spacier, the whole thing marinated in the guitar and vocals of Pepper Keenan. He left to concentrate on his role in metal supergroup Down, featuring members of Pantera and others, but now returns for his first album since 2005 with the band that made his name.
The good news is that, after a patchy couple of albums without Keenan, Corrosion of Conformity’s 10th is an atmospheric beast, with an undertow of southern boogie, southern gothic and, as per its title and moody downtempo title track, a certain southern focus on religion. It also contains a decent selection of rolling riff-monsters, notably the slow-starting but epic “Nothing Left to Say”, the sludgy six-minute closer “A Quest to Believe (A Call to the Void)” and the hefty “Old Disaster”.
The showcase guitar work is also a treat. Corrosion of Conformity don’t go in for hyperspeed shredding, and give their fret-wrangling room to breathe. The stoned jam interlude on “Wolf Named Crow”, a song about Keenan’s dog, is especially rich in this vein. Unlike many metal outings, No Cross No Crown paces itself, dropping in occasional short instrumental interludes between tracks, and the band is happily not afraid of a proper tune either, with songs such as “Forgive Me” boasting an unlikely catchiness among the blues-squall assault absorbed on first listening.
To non-metallers, the cover art and nomenclature may be off-putting but Corrosion of Confomity’s latest demonstrates there’s fierce, authentic and enjoyable hard rocking to be had with this band.
Overleaf: Watch the video for "Wolf Named Crow" by Corrosion of Conformity
Disc of the Day reviews new albums, week in, week out, all year. Below are the albums to which our writers awarded five stars. Click on any one of them to find out why.
SIMPLY THE BEST: THEARTSDESK'S FIVE-STAR REVIEWS OF 2017
Alan Broadbent: Developing Story ★★★★★ The pianist's orchestral magnum opus is packed with extraordinary things
For over 30 years, Melvins have been flagbearers for a kind of foundational American underground rock. Monstrously psychedelic, heavy as lead, mischievous and angry, they are part of a lineage that connects to squarepeg counterculture forefathers like Beefheart and The Fugs, share swathes of DNA with heavy metal and particularly Black Sabbath, and are particularly impervious to outside cultural shifts. Though they were fleetingly affiliated by the media with grunge, thanks to founder Buzz Osborne's musical and personal relationship to Kurt Cobain, they were something else.
Miraculous Mule summon up that great feeling when you walk into an anonymous festival marquee and are caught up in a storm of music by someone you’ve never heard of. Two Tonne Testimony has a looseness, where songs matter less than hefty grooves, a feeling that its stew of swamp rock, psychedelia and grungey biker riffs is merely the jumping-off point for a wild live show. It’s also punctuated by a very contemporary paranoia that time is running out.
In an age where things change at a lightning pace, where we are programmed for progress, touchstones are crucial. There’s a need for something we can rely on to remain solid, unchanging and free of the burden of momentum. The noise produced by Dinosaur Jr, which comprises J Mascis, Lou Barlow, drummer Murph and others, is just such a thing – gloriously monolithic and fondly familiar.
Right from their lo-fi beginnings, Glasgow’s Honeyblood have always been able to deliver the perfect kiss-off. It’s why it’s a relief to see that the duo’s self-titled debut album retains a fair slice of that crackle and hiss, Stina Tweeddale’s candy-coated vocals still providing a deceptive delivery method for her often venomous lyrics.