SPILL ALBUM REVIEW: MELVINS – GLUEY PORCH TREATMENTS (VINYL REISSUE)

Melvins
Gluey Porch Treatments (Vinyl Reissue)
Ipecac Recordings

Years ago in the small town of Montesano, WA, a three-piece band was playing with a musical fire they likely didn’t fully realize was burning at the time. Somehow, they tamed and manipulated that fire into something much bigger and more sinister. It became a huge fire that took some time for the world to even realize was burning. That fire was none other than Melvins.

A recent reissue on coloured vinyl with new cover art, Gluey Porch Treatments was unlike almost anything available at the time. Released in 1987 and lauded as a certain blueprint for the later genre that was to be famously labelled as “grunge”, Melvins didn’t so much kick in the doors as they did steamroll over the door with a dirty old rusted out tractor.

For the uninitiated, Gluey Porch Treatments could indeed be a mystifying experience. Opening with “Eye Flys”, listeners are treated to a trudge of simple bass strum with Dale Crover dropping his massive drum hits. A drone of feedback slowly builds ominously until Buzz Osborne lays into his axe with his signature dirty and punishing play style, as the song lumbers forward, spitting, stuttering, in a kind of frightening manner.

This is how the album generally plays out. It is an early form of a sound they managed to refine over the years, and while Gluey Porch Treatments isn’t their shining moment, it is still a fun introduction to a beast that was never really known for sounding pretty or having the most standard of song structures. It is a monster that sometimes slowly crawls like a sick wounded mammoth one minute, and then lunges at your throat the next. Truly something that the saccharine-coated teased-out hair crew weren’t all that ready for.

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