The Melvins - A Walk With Love & Death (Ipecac Recordings) 2017
7
A Walk with Love and Death is a sprawling, 81-minute album composed of typical Melvins work and a short-film score. While the Love portion is impressively strange and includes experimental instrumental tracks, the focal point is the Death offering.
It seems odd to have packaged the double-album like a cereal box–here are the Cheerios (Death) and here is your free gift inside (Love). Nevertheless, the nine classically Melvins compositions on Death are some of their finest. Ranging from downtuned metal to upbeat indie-pop, the sludge-founders have, as always, managed to simultaneously dazzle and confuse; somehow, it makes sense and flourishes under the trio’s watchful eyes and ears. On the punk-driven “Cactus Party,” featuring Teri Gender Bender of Le Butcherettes and Buzz Osbourne’s side-project Crystal Fairy, the band explores lighter, atypical territory than on massive, sludge-driven tracks like “Euthanasia.”
Melvins are veterans of reinventing the wheel of “heavy” and have, again, ventured outside the confines of the word. You will love Death.