Why do so many bands who apparently love making music take so long between actually making / releasing / playing the damn stuff? A brief look at the prodigious Melvins work rate reveals these guys are nearing levels of obsessive-compulsive behaviour. Pigs of the Roman Empire, unfortunately on this count, is yet another curveball for those awaiting an album of their more rock oriented material, coming more from the noise and electro-fuckery weirdness side of their brains. The project, with soundtrack composer and sound collector Lustmord—an artist in tune with their collaborative nature—uses source material from both parties stitched together.
Where Melvins are more than capable of experimenting with their own material, and still keeping it definitively ‘Melvins’, the seams of this group effort are noticeably visible. The album is clearly split between the dark ambient rumblings of Lustmord (“III” and “Zzzz Best”), Melvins rocking (“Bloated Pope”) and Melvins songs with Lustmord on the SFX and chopping board (“Safety Third”).
Where Melvins are more than capable of experimenting with their own material, and still keeping it definitively ‘Melvins’, the seams of this group effort are noticeably visible. The album is clearly split between the dark ambient rumblings of Lustmord (“III” and “Zzzz Best”), Melvins rocking (“Bloated Pope”) and Melvins songs with Lustmord on the SFX and chopping board (“Safety Third”).
Lustmord
The problem is simple. It’s just not as freaky as the sum of its elements. This should be an album that spits and foams with its eyes rolling back into its head while smashing between speakers bleeding noise haemorrhaging riffs and static. Something still recognisably rocking, but straining at its structural confines, Lustmord’s input seems merely to efface the thunder of the band. His touches are average dark ambient and he palliates what could otherwise be the sound of dread and belligerence. Instead, his input seems a little too random—a ‘whoosh’ here and an occasional ‘thud’—and invokes very little that could be termed real atmosphere, emotion or interest. The squall of “Pink Bat”s opening minute (think cheap broken wind-up keyboards) gives way to a Melvins song as heard through the kind of shitty boombox that you take to a friend’s barbeque because you don’t mind it getting soaked in beer and low-rent cocktails. It sounds good on paper, but it’s not. If a proper mix had been done, it would’ve been a killer Melvins tune. Even the insane Zorn horn that rips the latter half of the track is submerged in purposefully bad production.
“Idolatrous Apostate” and “Toadi Acceleration” show unfulfilled kernels of a good idea that might’ve worked better in the context of more conventionally structured songs. Left to form the backbone and singular point of note within these tracks, the ideas are squandered.
An interesting idea in theory, a good chunk of this release should have been deleted at the mastering stage. But in their efforts to keep it moving and putting a new slant on their songs, the Melvins have pissed on their own chips. Maybe they should have sat on this material a little longer, till Lustmord went away for example.
“Idolatrous Apostate” and “Toadi Acceleration” show unfulfilled kernels of a good idea that might’ve worked better in the context of more conventionally structured songs. Left to form the backbone and singular point of note within these tracks, the ideas are squandered.
An interesting idea in theory, a good chunk of this release should have been deleted at the mastering stage. But in their efforts to keep it moving and putting a new slant on their songs, the Melvins have pissed on their own chips. Maybe they should have sat on this material a little longer, till Lustmord went away for example.
Melvins & Lustmord
1.III
2.The Bloated Pope
3.Toadi Acceleratio
4.Pigs of the Roman Empire
5.Pink Bat
6.ZZZZ Best
7.Safety Third
8.Idolatrous Apostate
9.Untitled (Hidden Track)
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