MELVINS: An Audience With the King (2024)

By BRIAN GIFFIN

WORDS like legend and icon tend to be tossed around with wild abandon when it comes to anyone even remotely well known in their field. When it comes to Melvins frontman Buzz Osborne, however, such adjectives seem more than fitting.

Since 1983 he’s been carving out his own musical path, defying trend, convention and classification across a staggering catalogue of releases that lay the foundation for stoner rock and sludge metal, helped pioneer the Seattle rock scene and was lifetime friends with Kurt Cobain and Chris Cornell. In terms of modern metal, punk and alternative rock, there are few more influential figures.

When he dials in, old school, on the phone rather than doing a Zoom call, I admit to being just a little nervous.

“That’s good!” he says warmly. “That will make for a good interview!”

We begin by checking up on Dale Crover, Osborne’s partner in crime for almost his entire career. Last year the drummer underwent extensive surgery on his neck and upper spine, and is still very much in recovery mode.

“He’s doing as well as can be expected, under the circumstances,” Buzz explains. “He had some really gnarly neck surgery. How it happened, I have no idea. They replaced four discs in his neck and put a metal plate in it, so he can only rotate his head from the top vertebrae.”

Crover has, understandably, been unable to tour with Melvins since and has been replaced in the band for the time being by Coady Willis. Willis has had stints with the band before, notably in 2011 when they performed in Australia on the Soundwave tour with a dual-drummer line-up. This time they’ll be touring with Mr Bungle on that band’s first visit to Australia since 2001. The groups share plenty of history: Dunn has recorded with Melvins and he and Osborne play in Fantômas with Mike Patton and Dave Lombardo. Following these shows, Dunn and Osborne will be touring the US together, but more about that later.

Melvins’ latest album is called Tarantula Heart. I ask Buzz what, if anything, that title means, even though I had a feeling going into the interview that I already knew the answer. He pauses. For a long time.

“Maybe?” he finally says. It’s not exactly clear from his inflection if he doesn’t have an answer or he’s just not telling. “There hasn’t been too many interviews for the record yet so I don’t have a standard answer! I listed and listed and listed album and song titles, and that was one, and I really liked it.”

This round of interviews is primarily for the coming tour, but Buzz is equally happy to talk about Tarantula Heart even though media for it won’t properly begin until closer to the release date.

“Ask all you want about it,” he says pleasantly, “it doesn’t bother me in the least.”

Few could accuse Melvins of being a conventional band, so when he says the album “happened in a really weird way”, something pretty odd must have taken place. Tarantula Heart was created as a five piece with Ministry’s Roy Mayorga and Gary Chester of We Are the Asteroid joining Osborne, Crover and Steven McDonald.

“What we did was, we had Roy and Dale come in, we did the drums in two days, and we just jammed. I had a basic idea for a song, and we just jammed on it.”

If that doesn’t sound too different from the way a lot of bands write, then it isn’t. But Melvins aren’t just any band.

Buzz continues: “Then I took those drum sessions – we did maybe five to eight of those, up to 20 minutes each – and I went through them all and found four minute, three minute sections that I could write music to. Then when the guys heard it, Steven said ‘when did we do this?’ Because it sounded so alien to what it had sounded like before. I didn’t digitally edit the drums together. I just cut out whole sections. It’s not edited together, like I’m not cutting beats or whatever. It was a lot of fun.”

Essentially, Buzz was writing songs backward – taking the drum parts and then reworking song ideas to fit. It’s certainly quite a very different way to approach songwriting, but after a lifetime of doing it, he’s always looking for new ways to do things. It’s unlikely he’ll repeat that formula, however.

“You know, I’ve done 30-plus albums. I’m always looking to do something different. I don’t think I would do it again, but it was a fun way to do it. Because, now, if I went in to do it again, those guys would be thinking that. They didn’t know what we were going to do. They didn’t know what the record was going to be. Now if we went in there with the idea that was what we were going to do, that would ruin it.”

The result of this odd experiment is five tracks with titles that may seem to need as much explanation as the name of the album, but in the end probably don’t really mean anything. First single “Working the Ditch” was released earlier this month, but won’t feature in the set when Melvins play here.

“We’re not going to play it on the tour,” Osborne says. “The record doesn’t come out until April, so we thought it might be a little too soon, but people can hear how it sounds and so far it’s had a pretty big reaction.”

He’s been writing songs now for, he says, “as long as I can remember… always. And about 90 percent of it hasn’t been very good!” He uses a mining analogy to describe his process: “[it’s] like mining for gold. You have a lot of ore and get a tiny little kernel. I can’t do it any other way.”

Then once he’s found those nuggets, smelted them down and crafted them into something for the world to enjoy (or not!), he moves on. He doesn’t dwell on how things could have been done differently.

“By the time this record comes out … right now it’s new to me,” he says, “ and I can still listen to it. By the time this record comes out in April, I will have moved on. I will have already moved on to something else.”

The Melvins have always been a band that moves forward, always tweaking their sound, making changes, experimenting with different styles and elements. While they may not be considered so in the usual sense of the word when it comes to music, they are quite a progressive band when it comes to not letting anything hold back their creativity.

“We’re not really a legacy band and we don’t have any hits so we don’t have to worry about that,” Osborne says evenly. “It’s much more about what we’ve done lately. I think we’re progressive in that nature that each recording is as important as the next.”

Of course it isn’t easy coming up with fresh takes on one’s music all the time. It’s a constant challenge that he’s more than up for.

“It’s much more difficult than you’d imagine,” he admits. “I like odd time signatures and weirdness, and unless you’re on it, you’re never going to do it. Not everyone can do it, that’s for sure. But fortunately I’m in a position where almost everybody I’ve ever played with has been good. Our first bass player,” he qualifies, with a slight pause, “wasn’t good. I think everyone’s had problems, to various degrees, but right now, with Dale, Coady and Steven, we’ve got a really good team of people here. They’re all kick ass musicians.”

Trevor Dunn is another worthy of Buzz’s high praise. When these Australian shows are over, they’ll be touring the US as King Dunn, an acoustic duo playing tracks from Osborne’s 2014 solo album This Machine Kills Artists. Dunn is playing stand up bass.

“He’s a pretty great bass player. We did a big tour of the US where we did every state plus DC in 51 days. Right before the pandemic we were supposed to do a big huge tour and that all got cancelled, so now we’ve got the chance to go do it. I’m really looking forward to it.”

He’s also looking forward to returning to Australia. The Melvins won’t be showcasing any new tracks while they’re here, but Buzz Osborne promises we can expect a hell of a show. They’ll be playing like there’s no tomorrow.

“I’m looking forward to some fun-filled shows,” he says. “You never know what’s going to happen. It may be the last time we ever go there. I always try to do it like it’s the last time we’ll ever play there, so we have to make it worth it.”

TOUR DATES WITH MR BUNGLE

6/3: Festival Hall, Melbourne

7/3: Hundley St Music Hall, Adelaide

9/3: Hordern Pavilion, Sydney

10/4: Fortitude Music Hall, Brisbane

12/4: Metro City, Perth