Music / Melvins

aka: The Melvins

The Melvins were started in 1983 in Montesano, Washington by Roger "Buzz" Osborne, Matt Lukin, and Mike Dillard, who all attended the same high school. The band started out by playing a cross of Jimi Hendrix and Cream covers along with a few hardcore punk songs. Eventually, Mike Dillard left the group, and the band recruited Dale Crover (who would later play drums on a couple of songs on Nirvana's first album Bleach) to be on drums. Shortly after that, the group relocated to Dale's parents' house in Aberdeen, and their sound changed considerably with the decision to slow down their music after they heard Side B of Black Flag's My War. In 1986, the band released their first EP, Six Songs, followed by their debut a year later. The band had a rotating cast of new members, including Shirley Temple's daughter Lori "Lorax" Black on bass guitar. The band released a series of albums, splits, and EP's over the next few years that wound up being extremely influential to multiple artists and genres of music; bands like Nirvana, tool (who are personal friends with the band), Eyehategod, Neurosis, Mastodon, and Boris (who took their name from a Melvins song) cite them as influences.

Their (major) albums and EPs include:

• Melvins (EP; a.k.a. Six Songs), 1986
• Gluey Porch Treatments, 1987
• Ozma, 1989
• Bullhead, 1991
• Eggnog (EP), 1991
• King Buzzo (EP), 1992
• Dale Crover (EP), 1992
• Joe Preston (EP), 1992
• Lysol (a.k.a. Melvins or Lice-All), 1992
• Houdini, 1993
• Prick (as "Snivlem"), 1994
• Stoner Witch, 1994
• Stag, 1996
• Honky, 1997
• The Maggot, 1999
• The Bootlicker, 1999
• The Crybaby, 2000
• Electroretard, 2001
• Hostile Ambient Takeover, 2002
• Pigs of the Roman Empire (collaboration with Lustmord), 2004
• Never Breathe What You Can't See (collaboration with Jello Biafra), 2004
• (a) Senile Animal, 2006
• Nude with Boots, 2008
• The Bride Screamed Murder, 2010
• Freak Puke (Melvins Lite), 2012
• Everybody Loves Sausages, 2013
• Tres Cabrones (Melvins 1983), 2013
• Hold It In, 2014
• Three Men and a Baby (collaboration with Mike Kunka from godheadSilo), 2016
• Basses Loaded, 2016
• A Walk with Love & Death, 2017
• Pinkus Abortion Technician, 2018
• Working with God (Melvins 1983), 2021
• Five Legged Dog (all-acoustic album), 2021
• Bad Mood Rising, 2022
• Tarantula Heart, 2024

Tropes that apply to the Melvins:

• all lowercase letters: almost all of the track titles on the maggot/bootlicker/crybaby trilogy are rendered entirely in lower-case, which makes exceptions like "AMAZON" (which directly follows "amazon") and "we all love JUDY" stand out.
• Big Rock Ending: Parodied by the instrumental "Pick It n' Flick It", where the whole song is what would normally be considered a big rock ending. Also, "The Talking Horse", being three minutes long, featured less than a minute of actual singing and shouting, and that's in the middle of the track. On this scale, the rest of the song definitely counts as one.
• Cluster F-Bomb: "I Fuck Around", a parody of The Beach Boys' "I Get Around" with lots of added gratuitous f-bombs. Said to be something they'd started messing around with at soundchecks, then decided to actually record and release:
  I'm getting fucked fucking up and down this fucking street
  I gotta find a fucking place where the fuckheads meet
• Coattail-Riding Relative: Subverted with Sam Osborne; while it's no secret that he's King Buzzo's nephew, he has never tried to use his uncle's name for personal gain and has only ever played in decidedly underground death metal acts (most notably Funebrarum and Undergang) to begin with.
• Cover Album: Everybody Loves Sausages. Electroretard doesn't quite count, but it's about half true cover versions, half rearranged versions of their own songs.
• Cover Version: Aside from the aforementioned Everybody Loves Sausages and half of Electroretard, they've covered Hank Williams, KISS, Butthole Surfers, The Germs, Green River...among others. The Melvins themselves have been covered by Mastodon, The Dillinger Escape Plan, Strapping Young Lad, and Pig Destroyer...among others, yet again.
  • Their appearance on a tribute album to Pink Floyd's The Wall is notable for pulling a fast one on listeners - what starts out seeming like a straightforward cover version of The Wall's opening track "In The Flesh" turns out to be a cover of the identically titled Blondie song In the Style of Pink Floyd.
• Digital Piracy Is Evil:
  • The artwork to (A) Senile Animal includes a parody of the normal FBI anti-piracy warning often found on compact discs:
  FBI Anti Piracy Warning: Unauthorized Copying is punishable under federal law. So don't do it or the FBI will come and get you and then your life will be ruined and it won't be anyone's fault but your own so don't go trying to blame someone else for your reckless disregard for the legal system. Your sense of entitlement is astonishing and it will inevitably be your downfall if you don't grow up and take responsibility for your actions.
  • The CD edition of The Maggot splits every song into two tracks - rumor has it that this was meant to troll would-be pirates by causing them to inadvertently only download half a song. As with above, it and the other "trilogy" albums also include parodies of the normal anti-piracy warning:
  (The Maggot) Unauthorized duplication is illegal, you cheap-assed bastards.
  (The Bootlicker) Unauthorized duplication is illegal, you small type reading pinhead.
  (The Crybaby) Unauthorized duplication is totally illegal, so don't even think about it.
• Distinct Double Album: A Walk with Love & Death: The Death disc is meant to be a relatively standard Melvins-style rock album. The Love disc is the soundtrack to a short film (also titled A Walk with Love & Death) and is a mix of sound collage and pure noise.
• Doom Metal: The Trope Codifier of the sludge metal subgenre. They also dabbled with stoner metal and standard doom metal itself.
• Epic Rocking: The average length of a Melvins song is roughly two to five minutes (depending on the album), however there are some that exceed this. Bullhead contains the eight-and-a-half-minute "Boris", Hostile Ambient Takeover has the sixteen-minute "Anti-Vermin Seed", Lysol brings forth "Hung Bunny" and "Roman Dog Bird", Siamese Twin Songs of about eleven and seven and a half minutes, respectively (or on CD editions of the album, the entire 31-minute album as one track), Pigs of the Roman Empire has the 22-and-a-half-minute Title Track, and the live album Colossus of Destiny is an hour-long noise jam leading into the song "Eye Flys" from their first album (which is itself a six-and-a-half-minute track).
• Expo Speak Gag: The demo compilation Mangled Demos from 1983 includes a track titled "Bibulous Confabulation During Rehearsal": it's five minutes of Studio Chatter, and "bibulous confabulation" can in fact be boiled down to "drunken chatter".
• Genre Roulette: Don't expect any one release to be the same as the other, even within the same release itself. You might get their signature slow metal, then suddenly get avant-garde noise rock out of nowhere.
• A Good Name for a Rock Band: The name came from Osborne's days as a clerk at a Montesano-area Thriftway, where "Melvin" was a particularly hated supervisor who was apparently arrested at some point for stealing Christmas trees. Everyone thought that it was an appropriately ridiculous name for the music they were making, and so it stuck.
• Greatest Hits Album: Melvinmania: Best of the Atlantic Years 1993–1996, a UK-only compilation that featured a handful of songs each from the albums Houdini, Stoner Witch, and Stag, and was released without the band's involvement. A more extensive, band-selected "Best Of" was included as a companion piece to the art-book Neither Here nor There.
• Female Rockers Play Bass: Usually an all-male band, but they briefly had a female bassist in Lori Black.
• Hidden Track: The Maggot, The Bootlicker and The Crybaby were meant to form a loose trilogy, so the former two had a snippet of the first song on the next album in the series hidden after the last song. The Crybaby included a snippet of "amazon", the first track on The Maggot instead, which sort of gives Bookends to these three albums.
• Indecipherable Lyrics: Several songs, "Roman Dog Bird" being the most notable with at least three different versions of the lyrics floating around out there.
• In Name Only: The cover of "Venus in Furs" by Velvet Underground. It plays part of the first line, and then suddenly turns into 3 and a half minutes of incoherent cacophony.
  Shiny shiny, shiny boots of leathAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!
  • "Heathen Earth", from the Cover Album Everybody Loves Sausages, is credited as a Throbbing Gristle cover - Throbbing Gristle have an album called Heathen Earth, but it doesn't have a Title Track (nor did they ever release a song of that title), and "Heathen Earth" seems to actually be an original Melvins piece In the Style of Throbbing Gristle.
• Idiosyncratic Cover Art: The Maggot, The Bootlicker, and The Crybaby all have very similar cover designs, which again relates to the band considering them a "trilogy:": They all have close-ups of different kinds of flowers as a cover image, the band name and title are rendered in the same fonts and appear in the same place, and above the "v" in "Melvins" is a grey circle with a number (1-3) inside it. And then there's the KISS-homaging artwork of their 1992 solo EPs. In general, the CD editions of many Melvins albums ^note most of the ones released or reissued on Ipecac Recordings have the quirk of placing the track-list, UPC, and copyright information on the front of the booklet, and the proper "cover art" on the back of the case, instead of the other way around as is usual: This allows for a slightly wider cover image.
• Lucky Charms Title: The demo collection Mangled Demos from 1983 includes tracks with titles like "☘" and "✈" alongside more conventionally named songs. It's possible the band forgot the names of these long-forgotten songs or just never settled on proper names for them to begin with. There's also the song "HOW --++--" off of Honky.
• Misplaced-Names Poster: Early pressings of Gluey Porch Treatments mixed up the band members' names on the back cover photo.
• New Sound Album: The Melvins have never stuck to one particular sound, experimenting with sounds that could qualified as stoner metal, drone metal, avant-garde, and just straight-up punk rock.
  • The Bootlicker has the gimmick of eschewing distorted guitars for an entire album, which brings out more of a Psychedelic Rock feel - some critics even compared the album to funk or jazz due to the more prominent use of bass guitar.
• Remix Album: Chicken Switch. Whereas most albums of this type include remixes of individual songs, in this case the band let remixers use entire albums, with generally chaotic, avant-garde results.
• Repetitive Audio Glitch: "Pearl Bomb" starts with 30 seconds of what sounds like a skipping CD. Then this loop is joined by clearly non-glitching bass and vocals, and essentially functions as the rhythm track for the song.
• Revolving Door Band: The Melvins never had the same bassist for too long. Throughout their four-decade lifespan, they went through more than a dozen bassists. While they have a stable drummer in Dale Crover, he was briefly preceded by Mike Dillard, and he used to share drumming duties with Coady Willis for a couple years.
• Self-Titled Album: Sort of. Lysol was originally going to just be called Lysol, but as it turns out, the name was a registered trademark, so the album was recalled and black ink or electric tape covered the offending word, and the album was made a self-titled album. Originally, fans could peel off the tape or rub off the ink, however doing this now would only damage the record. A 2014 vinyl reissue re-titled the album as Lice-All, which is of course pronounced exactly the same as the original title.
• "Sesame Street" Cred: They voiced themselves in an episode of Uncle Grandpa.
• Sdrawkcab Name: The band wanted to release Prick on one record label (AmRep) while signed to another one (Atlantic). The latter label had the rights to their name at the time, so the band name was rendered in mirrored writing (i.e. "Snivlem") wherever it appeared on the artwork.
• Shout-Out:
  • "GGIIBBYY" is named after Butthole Surfers vocalist Gibby Haynes.
  • "The Brain Center at Whipple's" is named for an episode of The Twilight Zone (1959).
  • In 1992, the then-current members of the band (Buzz Osborne, Dale Crover, and Joe Preston) put out one solo EP each, largely as an elaborate reference to KISS having done the same thing in 1978, but with full albums. Like those KISS albums, each EP was released under the band's name, with the member whose solo effort it was serving as the title. The artwork to each EP also featured an airbrushed portrait of a Melvins member, done in the same style of the Kiss releases, and the band's logo was changed to one that parodied that of KISS. Some non-KISS shout-outs on those releases also occurred in the form of Credits Gags: King Buzzo credits Dale Nixon on bass, after the pseudonym Greg Ginn used for playing bass on Black Flag's My War. Joe Preston credits Marina Sirtis with "counseling", as a reference to the actress who portrayed Counselor Deanna Troi in Star Trek: The Next Generation.
  • The title of "Jew Boy Flower Head" is a pun on the Didjits' "Killboy Powerhead"
  • "Buck Owens" is named after the country musician, though it's a Non-Appearing Title and the song otherwise has nothing to do with him.
  • The song title "Snake Appeal" is most likely a pun on The Stooges' "Shake Appeal".
  • The title of "Phylis Dillard" [sic] combines the names of actress/comedian Phyllis Diller and their first drummer Mike Dillard.
  • Pinkus Abortion Technician is a pun on the Butthole Surfers album Locust Abortion Technician, combining the title with the last name of Butthole Surfers bassist Jeff Pinkus. The cover art is also a parody of the Butthole Surfers album artwork - Locust Abortion Technician had a painting of a clown wagging his finger in the face of a dog on the cover, while Pinkus Abortion Technician has a cruder drawing of that same dog with a bloody severed finger in its mouth. Fittingly, Pinkus plays on the album, and it's bookended with Cover Versions of Butthole Surfers songs.
  • Electroretard includes a special thanks to "A. Hilter" - Word of God is it's a reference to a Monty Python sketch where Adolf Hitler was living in Somerset, England, wearing a fairly transparent disguise and going by the name of "Mr. Hilter".
• Silence Is Golden: "Pure Digital Silence" from Prick is, aside from a brief intro by Mark Deutrom in a fake British accent, precisely that - about a minute and a half of pure... digital... silence.
• Silver Fox: Buzz Osborne in recent years (as seen in the photo above).
• Spoken Word in Music:
  • "Divorced", a collaboration with tool, features a phone conversation between Danny Carey and Maynard James Keenan, which is apparently regarding a mutual friend going out with a woman who Maynard describes as having "a voice like a fuckin' modem, dude!" - Maynard then does his impression of her. The song also includes some singing, albeit with Indecipherable Lyrics.
  • "Hog Leg" begins with some nonsensically quote mined samples from a record of Pat Robertson sermons (e.g. "We can go to church, and you're naked", "Christians... are commanded... alcohol... is good").
  • "Dry Drunk" has a bit of scripted dialogue between members of the band Godzik Pink as a transition between the main section of the song and an instrumental interlude - this includes someone corpsing and having to start over again.
• Step Up to the Microphone: Being a solo EP, Dale Crover has all vocals performed by Dale Crover. Crover also sings "Cottonmouth" from Stag. Hold It In has Paul Leary and Jeff Pinkus of Butthole Surfers sing lead on three songs each: Pinkus on "Bride of Crankenstein", "Nine Yards", and "Piss Pistofferson" and Leary on "You Can Make Me Wait", "Eyes on You", and "I Get Along (Hollow Moon)". This can be difficult to discern on "Bride of Crankenstein" because Jeff Pinkus seems to be imitating Buzz.
• Surprisingly Gentle Song: They've done relatively sedate covers of "Ramblin' Man", "Okie from Muskogee", "You're My Best Friend", and the traditional Canadian folk song "Peggy Gordon". For originals, there's "Black Bock", a lightly psychedelic folk-rock song about mutilating a goat, and "You Can Make Me Wait", a surprising experiment in Jangle Pop with the vocals heavily processed through a vocoder.
• Surreal Music Video: Pretty much every video they've released to some extent. But "The Talking Horse" stands out for having a Mind Screw plot that spoofs multiple conspiracy theories, as well as for being an invisible band video where inanimate objects lip sync.
• Stealth Insult: Sort of. Their name comes from a person that Buzz worked with named Melvin that nobody liked; he considered the name to be so stupid, he named his band that as another form of insulting him.
• Take That!: "Laughing with Lucifer at Satan's Sideshow" uses Spoken Word in Music to satirize the less-than-cordial relations the band had with their former label.
• The "The" Title Confusion: "Melvins" vs. "The Melvins". The band usually uses the former, but haven't always been consistent about it... And their two albums where they collaborated with Jello Biafra are officially by Jello Biafra with the Melvins, probably because it flows better as an artist name. The confusion is referenced in the cover art to A Senile Animal, which renders the band name as "(the) Melvins" and the album as "(a) Senile Animal"... And the cover of Tres Cabrones bills them as "Los Melvins" to go with the Gratuitous Spanish title.
• Title, Please!: A rare non-television example: Lysol doesn't list its tracks on any official version of the album (not helped by the whole thing being mastered as one track on CD releases)—only a test pressing of the LP version gave away the track titles (albeit lumping both "Second Coming" and "Ballad of Dwight Fry" under the latter name).
• Unplugged Version: Five Legged Dog is mainly acoustic versions of previously electric songs, though they generally don't make the arrangements any softer or slower.
• Wild Hair: The signature look of Buzz Osborne - he's the one in the top right of the page image. A common joke among the fanbase (especially on YouTube) is that he "looks like Sideshow Bob and laughs like Krusty the Clown". Possibly also the reason the whole band are depicted as off-brand Troll dolls in the Animated Music Video for "Electric Flower".
• Word Salad Lyrics: If it makes even a lick of sense, chances are it's a cover. Sometimes goes far enough to be considered Speaking Simlish, most prominently in "Hooch", the opening track of Houdini, and the only song on the album to have its "lyrics" printed. It wasn't left unnoticed: the music video of the said song was featured in Beavis and Butt-Head, where Butt-Head tried to figure out the lyrics for Beavis. For reference, here's the first "verse" of the song, taken straight from the booklet.
  "Los ticka toe rest. Might likea sender doe ree
  Your make a doll a ray day sender bright like a penelty
  Exi-tease my ray day member half lost a beat away
  Purst in like a one way sender war give a heart like a fay"

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