Most bands grow more sedate with age; Melvins just seem to get sludgier. Twenty-five albums in, the band have long since perfected a sound that’s as dense as a neutron star. Death, the first disc of new double-album A Walk With Love and Death, continues the trend, with molasses-thick riffs played at a catatonic pace, punctuated by the slightest hint of a skewed melody on the likes of the magnificently titled lead single Christ Hammer. It is a perfectly serviceable Melvins album, though given that there have been 14 of those this century alone, casual fans might be tempted to avoid it. The intriguing outlier here, though, is the second disc, Love.
The accompaniment to an avant garde short film, it comprises a series of sound collages, guitar spasms and bursts of howled spoken word that, taken together, resemble someone performing an exorcism in an underpass. While the band have dabbled in such outre experimentation before, most notably on Pigs of the Roman Empire, their 2004 collaboration with noise veteran Lustmord, this is perhaps their most fully realised version yet. It’s utterly uncompromising and very much for a select audience, but it is hard not to admire the band’s continued willingness to bash at the boundaries of extreme music.
