North Carolina band scores album after 'happy accident'

Guitarist and singer Buzz Osborne isn't clear on just how many bass players have passed through the ranks in the 33 years his band, The Melvins, has been around.

"Off the top of my head, I couldn't tell you," Osborne says while driving to North Carolina from a gig in Baltimore.

Their numbers are legion, like drummers in Spinal Tap, and count among them Mudhoney member Matt Lukin, Shirley Temple's daughter Lori Black and Mr. Bungle member Trevor Dunn.

The band will play tonight at Little Rock's Metroplex with bassist Steve McDonald from Redd Kross and Off!.

There are six bassists on The Melvins' new album, the aptly named Basses Loaded, including several who have played in the band previously and one, Krist Novoselic, who has known Osborne since their rebellious youth in rural Washington state and who was one-third of a grunge combo called Nirvana.

The album's genesis can be traced back about a decade, when guitarist-singer Osborne and drummer Dale Crover, the two Melvins mainstays, started bringing in other musicians to play with them. Gathering those songs along with newer projects with other bassists -- including members of Big Business and Mr. Bungle -- resulted in an album's worth of thunderous bottom end.

"Once we compiled everything else we had done ... we just realized we had all these different players on it and that's just how it worked. It was a happy accident," Osborne, 54, says.

Another happy accident of sorts was the participation of Novoselic, who appears on the track "Maybe I Am Amused."

"He's not too keen on working too hard, that's for sure," says Osborne, who is known for his work ethic and punctuality. "I think if we tried to make it happen, he wouldn't have done it. 'Just a minute' to him means three or four weeks."

Basses Loaded is an intriguing project, complete with that signature Melvins heaviness and doses of the band's warped sense of humor -- just listen to "Shaving Cream," a raunchy take on the 1946 Benny Bell novelty song, and then there's "Planet Destructo," which starts as regular rocker and then morphs into bona fide free jazz improv.

"The Decay of Lying," the plodding opening track, is his current favorite to play in concert, Osborne says.

The Melvins, subject of the new documentary The Colossus of Destiny: A Melvins Tale, were formed by Osborne in 1983 in Montesano, Wash. Crover -- who played drums with Nirvana on the demo that resulted in that band's debut, Bleach -- joined after original drummer Mike Dillard left and a longstanding rock 'n' roll partnership was forged.

"Thirty-three years is a long time to do anything," Osborne says.

The Melvins and Nirvana members remained close -- Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain regularly praised his Melvins pals in interviews after "Smells Like Teen Spirit" launched that band into the pop culture stratosphere. As a result, Osborne and company signed a deal with Atlantic Records that lasted for three albums -- 1993's Houdini, 1994's Stoner Witch and 1996's Stag. The Melvins were the opening act for what turned out to be the final Nirvana gig in Munich on March 1, 1994, before Cobain killed himself on April 5, 1994. (Ever blunt, Osborne, in a review at thetalkhouse.com about the acclaimed 2015 Cobain documentary Montage of Heck, said the film was "Total bull****" and wrote that he "found it to be mostly misguided fiction.")

Since the beginning, The Melvins have trafficked in the kind of bruising, heavy music that would later be called sludge metal, doom metal or stoner rock. Equal parts slowed-down rock jams and My War-era Black Flag, The Melvins cut a distinctive swath through the punk rock underground -- almost as distinctive as Osborne's unruly Sideshow Bob coif.

And they've never feared bowing to the call of their experimental urges. A sampling:

• A few years back, Osborne and Crover recruited members of Big Business to become Melvins, adding a second drummer to Crover's already monstrous sound and touring with the setup.

• The 2001 album Colossus of Destiny, an almost hour-long live recording of white-noise bleeps, synthesizer sounds, samples and feedback.

• A three-album trilogy -- The Maggot, The Bootlicker and The Crybaby -- all released in 1999.

• In 2012, as a trio with Trevor Dunn of Mr. Bungle on bass, the band set a world record by playing 51 shows in all 50 United States and the District of Columbia in a mind-boggling 51 days.

The Melvins have recorded for Ipecac Records, owned by old buddy and Faith No More vocalist Mike Patton (Osborne and Crover also play with Patton in Fantomas), since 1999, and have long recorded special projects for Minneapolis-based Amphetamine Reptile as well.

"We do whatever we want to," Osborne says of the band's restlessness and fiercely independent, do-it-yourself stance. "There's no textbook for this kind of thing. You just kind of make it up as you go along."

Style on 09/13/2016