Melvins 1983
Thunderball
Ipecac Recordings
The rules of Thunderball are simple: just let Buzz Osborne do whatever he wants. He’s revived the old Melvins 1983 moniker for a mind-bending third record, moonlighting again with original Melvins drummer Mike Dillard to run a gauntlet of nasty, serrated guitars and rugged beats through spooky worlds of alien electronica, diabolically charted by co-conspirators Void Manes and Ni Maîtres. The game’s afoot and anything goes.
Cleaned of the mudslides of oily sludge Osborne and company usually wallow in, the exhilarating, shape-shifting Thunderball is, nonetheless, a menacing, bludgeoning beast, with a complex network of guitar savagery harassed by nervy skitter and shaking its fist at dark, enveloping waves of noise. The heavy growl of the dreamlike “Venus Blood” and its quasar of chaos give Thunderball a send-off of moody, monstrous terror, with dissonant, twisting, psychedelic glasswork accompanying its occult funeral procession to a Black Mountain hideaway. It’s a fitting closing chapter.
What precedes it is no less imaginative or gripping, as a vicious “King of Rome” charges like a bull seeing red, Osborne’s hoary, distant vocals fighting to be heard over furious riffs on loan from Slayer. “Vomit of Clarity” is where Manas and Maîtres land on a lonely, cold planet of sound, encountering a deep abyss of metallic, sci-fi chatter and gathering blackness. Like something out of The War of the Worlds, only bleaker and more disturbing, its cinematic dread and scurrying fear spreads into the sinister moan and stinging, tribal stomp of “Short Hair with a Wig,” which surges like Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” and listens for a death rattle. This isn’t the Moroccan desert, though.
For all its atmospheric mystery, descents into madness, and spacey horror, Thunderball also thrives on hypnotic builds and churns, as well as freaky, cacophonous squalls – elements that swell and subside in an epic “Victory of the Pyramids.” Well-plotted, with thrilling highs and ruinous collapses, Thunderball feels compact, weighing in at only five tracks. There are multitudes, however, within every one of them.
