Houdini in Bloomington, MN

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
and candy-footed
funk metal
,
, 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
's immediate predecessors,
Eggnog
and
Bullhead
, pried open a few screwball chasms in
' 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,
oeuvre has begun to rival -- at least on paper -- the career arcs of
Frank Zappa
Neil Young
. ~ Patrick Kennedy