Register Forgot login?

© 2002-2024
Encyclopaedia Metallum

Privacy Policy

Melvins > Bullhead > Reviews
Melvins - Bullhead

Stoner Boner - 99%

Mercyful Trouble, August 15th, 2022
Written based on this version: 1991, CD, Boner Records

Being enamored with the sounds of a regional scene, era, or style of music is a pretty thrilling feeling, to the point where once you've been immersed in those genres for long enough, you start to reminisce about the timeframe when you were just getting into it. You miss discovering the artist(s) who first entagled you into their web of associated acts defined by consistently recognizable musical ideas, and perhaps re-create your own initial awe vicariously, by introducing others to these bands. It's a delightful feeling, one that I myself am very happy to have experienced thanks to a variety of timeless works! So many great bands to discover out there!

(The) Melvins were NOT one such band for me, at all. I had heard a couple random tracks that I didn't really remember and was already soured on just because of how they came off. At first, they seemed influential in the worst ways possible, despite my liking for early NOLA sludge and AiC at the time. Every last thing about this band just screamed hipster, snob, meant to appeal to self-proclaimed music connoisseurs, experimental-just-for-the-sake-of-it, and if I had to think of another, "utter-and-complete-moron", to be quite honest. After all, drone is stupid, there's no such thing as "good drone" or "bad drone", it's not music, it has no reason whatsoever to be associated with metal (not even doom), and anyone who says they like it is ONLY drawn to the novelty of it (and to be fair, after digging into the genre since then, some of these claims are still understandable, at the very least).

To make matters worse, playing "various" genres and having so many full-lengths strewn about willy-nilly also seemed very low-effort, like an excuse for not being particularly good at anything, basically. Keep in mind, this was the thought process of a teen who was really into metal that is associated with metal and had yet to learn much of the overlap it shares with other genres of music. As such, the mere idea of bands like this who simply "happen to have played metal at times" was very off-putting for me. However, the fairly humble proposition of Bullhead, a 35-minute album ostensibly regarded as being more along the lines of regular, heavy, guitar-driven sludge/stoner metal seemed neat, and more likable than I wanted to admit actually. The cover art also seemed slightly less annoyingly post-modern than some Melvins full-lengths before and after it. Having 8 tracks that aren't abnormally short or long and being released in the earlier 90's also subconsciously made me more keen on checking it out, in-depth anyway.

Turns out I loved it, front to back. The result was that Bullhead became an album representing a turning point in my music taste, unifying in my mind some of the different facets of where music can sit culturally that I was discussing at the beginning of this review. Melvins proved influential not only to the regional scene of Seattle located very close to them, but also to the aforementioned New Orleans up-and-comers, some peculiar Japaenese fellows who are considered their most noteworthy disciples, and numerous future sludge, drone, grunge, and stoner bands. As such, I now see this band as basically the central figure of 90's experimentation in heavy music, and as leading the charge among many of the bands they're today compared to.

Of course, my taste still leans more towards "conventional" heaviness, but that is actually the beauty of the sounds heard on Bullhead; the experimentation is evident in a way that grabs the listener's attention but does not detract from what's so enjoyable about good old heavy rock - as trippy and bizarre as a song like "Zodiac" gets midway through, I can still say that it's just cool sounding and strangely groovy, like a more dissonant and spazzy version of Vitus/Sabbath guitar intervals (sort of). Elsewhwere, listen to "It's Shoved" - Dale's opening drum beat and the bassline that follows make the spinning guitar/vocal patterns to come more approachable. You combine this with the fact that King Buzzo's vocals, eclectic and mind-numbing as his delivery may often be, are still relatively melodic compared to the harsh delivery of most sludge metal bands that otherwise are much more musically conventional than Melvins, and what you have is a rather accessible album. When hearing it all the way through for the first time, I gathered that it was a much easier, if not the easiest, to digest Melvins outing, but that's what finally convinced me that this band is genuinely talented and not the just-because experimentors I originally saw them as. Those kinds of assumptions about stuff that just rubbed me the wrong way were always particularly hard for me to move past, so that's another reason why I call this album one of my turning points.

Now despite the accessibility of much of the music here, it's by no means mainstream-pandering either - it reflects the Melvins' presence in underground and experimental music for a reason. Buzzo's inane grumbling like at the beginning of "If I Had An Exorcism" is going to be a straight-up deal breaker for some who may even like harsher sludge than this, while the oppressive plod of "Boris" is going to scare away anyone not at least familiar with traditional doom by time they hear it. However, if that is your thing, then you too will adore the suffocating soundscape of "Ligature" - it reaches the same kind of trudge heard on the latter 8-and-a-half-minute crawler, but not before beginning with a wall of utter low-end distortion that inverts the cheerier, brighter big-sounding aura that opens up "Anaconda." In both cases, this is a type of power-chord-derived heaviness that I have a harder time grasping. It's the drone-y kind; heavy and slow in a different sort of way where everything resonates more and they're riding on the amplifier feedback. Guitar and bass strings aren't being plucked with as much force as in straightforward doom metal, nor would you want them to be, the tone isn't quite conducive to stomping those power chords down measure after measure. It sounds awesome this way, while of course still retaining more of a sense of direction than full-on drone.

Ah, I always have a little harder time remembering the last two tracks here other than that Dale's kit mastery shines a whole lot, but this entire album is an essential experience for anyone looking into the origins of a variety of experimental styles, especially those on the slower side of heavy music. Really, that's the best description I can give of the far-reaching impact of an album such as Bullhead; go hang out in any doom/stoner/sludge community for a little while and see for yourself. I never thought one album could win me over to the point of praising a band with a discography as vast and unpredictable as these guys, but before long I was digging the more abrasive sludge of Houdini and the low-keyed moments on Stoner Witch too, so it all kind of went from there. If you're just stumbling across this absurd outfit, then the 1991 fruit bowl is where you should start.

Shrivel and merge - 86%

gasmask_colostomy, June 5th, 2019

Let me preface this review by saying that summer is a fucking bitch and it can go curl up and die.

There’s a lot of weird shit to talk about today, and that’s because we’re on the subject of Melvins, who were friends with Kurt Cobain, invented a genre, and named themselves after a guy they didn’t like. And most people still don’t know them 32 years after their first album.

The genre they helped invent was sludge metal, if you were wondering, and that’s what Bullhead sounds most like, although you may also be excused for thinking that they were giving a hand in the evolution of stoner rock. It’s also one of the many missing links between grunge and metal, which 1991 probably has a lot of, but this is one of the best.

Today I cycled 15 minutes to work and was so hot I couldn’t stop sweating for an hour. Fuck that.

Here’s an album that is nowhere near eloquent enough to express its own rage and frustration. The times when Buzz Osborne just can’t get his jaw round actual words and opts to yelp something difficult to transcribe – that’s how those feelings really feel. Before ‘If I Had an Exorcism’ becomes droning jam rock, it goes:

It's not like a you could feel just
Like what you want more metal, heh!
Hangin' from your neck like
Feels too good to be real
Like somebody took a coathanger
Munched it and tore it from the sign
stin...stern...st'nning
numzph-numonh, bleeargh.

If I had an exorcism for every drop of sweat I’ve lost today…I’d have sweated more.

Dale Crover didn’t get out enough in 1991. He just stomped around his bedroom, footsteps like tom-toms, soloing on the floor until he got yelled at by his neighbours. One of his neighbours had an anaconda. They named a song after it: the wriggle-shout-stomp of the whole experience. It’s articulated like a lizard and restless like maggots in hot grease.

Crover doesn’t even care enough about the neighbours to stop playing when Osborne and Lori Black (cocktail and actress Shirley Temple’s daughter…) quit early from ‘Cow’ after desert grooves and a splash of feedback. He starts up another beat and then proceeds to solo on as if Rush and The Dillinger Escape Plan are making babies in his head. The track has four or five fake endings, perhaps more if anticipating the rhythm of his playing.

Last night, I had a dream that I had become an on-call translator for an entire international company. My pillow was wet all night. I didn’t sleep well.

Imagine your favourite Sleep song. (It’s ‘Dragonaut’, right?) That’s what ’Boris’ sounds like. Except, rather than the slow, fuzzy crush of Sabbath doom, this is a pre-Crowbar lurker that has a weird, angry, non-stoned edge, like running away from your disabled, hatchet-wielding grandmother in a dream where your legs keep sinking into the pavement.

The last part of the song is just Osborne drawling and grinding out nonsense while the flatulent bass farts out the riff on its own. Like your grandmother has caught you and is trying to mount you.

I’d be pouring sweat too if that were my dream. Sweet summer love.

The unshowy nature of Melvins’ extroversion is their trump card. Bullhead is flat and simple and unfussy. ‘Zodiac’ goes faster and might be about the serial killer, but it’s not punk, it’s spaz rock. ‘It’s Shoved’ plays catchier, more basic rock ‘n’ roll, but it’s not even a proper song – it only has one verse. Osborne occasionally solos, as on ‘Your Blessened’, but he sticks longer to the feedback that follows the solo than the actual solo itself.

Ignoring the rightness of what Melvins did is easy. That cover art is striking because no one would choose it to represent their music. The bandmembers combine rock music skills with metal sounds and calmly massacre all that with drugged prog enthusiasm. It ends up somewhere in the middle – a fruitbowl of apples and oranges slowly softening into a furry massed pulp.

Sweat summer love, go curl up and die.

Ween's 'The Pod', but Metal - 100%

RealHumanEars, May 19th, 2019

In a time of musical revolution against the clean cut, makeup wearing non-musicians of the LA strip, bands started emerging out of unlikely places making new, and most importantly, real music. One of the most well know of these bands is The Melvins, a band from a small, suburban town of less than 5000 people, making a venomous mixture of the doom of Black Sabbath and the unbridled aggression of Black Flag into what would later turn into sludge metal. At the time the Melvins were just making what they thought was fun and didn't care who liked it and who didn't.

By 1991, almost 10 years into their existence, the band had practically perfected their niche sound and would solidify that statement with their most defining, realized album yet, Bullhead. On this album Buzzo and crew travel minimalism and heaviness in glorious fashion, melding the two into one of their first meetings in history. The compositions, whether intentionally or not, travel very odd time signatures in their trademark noisy, almost sloppy fashion, such as Ligature and the neutron star of the Melvins discography, Boris. Buzzo shouts, rasps and moans his way over these riffs with almost completely indecipherable nonsensical lyrics that seemingly offer no meaning and almost just seem there for the rhythmic aspect. Anaconda and Ligature for example, while being two of the best songs on the album, don't even feature one discernible phrase in the lyrics. Outside of the contents of the lyrics, Buzzo's vocals sound completely manic, featuring screams that border on wails, and lower range cleans laden with cracks, heavy breathing, rasps and hard to describe throat noises that seem impossible to replicate.

This leads to this album's greatest and most mind banding quality, Dale Crover and his drumming. Dale plays these songs with so much power despite the unbelievably complex and hard to feel patterns written. Your Blessened and Ligature, for example, feature some of the most impossible to predict beats ever put to album and Dale plays them with such conviction and strength. With most drummers you'd get one or the other at best, technical prowess or heart. Dale showcases both, forcing the spotlight to him even over some of the best riffs the band has ever written.

The album's highlight comes right at the start with the opener, Boris. In my opinion, Boris is one of the heaviest things ever written. Sure, it's not extreme metal, there's no harsh vocals and there isn't even a second riff, but it's the rawest showing of pure anger that I've ever heard, and it's written about a cat of all things. The riff drones behind Buzzo's rasps and nonsensical lines as Dale Crover plays stuff that wouldn't seem out of place on a John Zorn album, completely neglecting the fundamentals of drumming and carving his own path through the song. On first listen, every new repeat of the riff seems like it leads to some new way Dale Crover has chosen to mess with it and make it harder to follow. When Dale drops out of the song and Buzzo plays the riff by himself for the rest of the song, he channels the most eerie, hard to listen to vocal performance on the entire album, grunting and screaming his way through the completely random lines.

All in all, the album is a confusing mess executed in just the right way. Everything seems equal parts carefully crafted and improvised. While hard to grasp in certain aspects, the album rewards those who listen multiple times with some of the best music the world has to offer. Peeling back the layers of distortion and polyrhythms reveals the one thing that truly matters when it comes to music, fun. It's not accessible, it's not easy listening, but you cannot deny that it is the Melvins in their young, primal years, making an album that will likely stand the test of time better than most. A masterpiece in the weirdest way possible.

100/100

Man's only distant relative - 86%

hippie_holocaust, December 27th, 2011

The Melvins’ Bullhead of Boner Records fame captures the legendary three piece band at quite possibly the heaviest moments of their long existence. It all starts with “Boris,” the song that not only named a band but perhaps helped spawn an entire genre. This lumbering, belligerent brute heaves forth with an almost stumbling rhythm as that of a drunken giant reveling in his own reckless bigness, what with its ball crushing drums and stoney hammer-on riffage. Sludge, stoner, Sab-worship, yea, perhaps the clichés could be inferred, but c’mon folks, this is 1991, and the Melvins were in the midst of cementing their status as godfathers of the great western heavy metal underground. While the radio friendly Seattle bands that I’d rather not name here were busy getting rich quick and discovering heroin, true rocknrollers such as Sleep and the Melvins kept it real, and by that I mean real fucking heavy.

The semantic difficulties and tedious categorization perpetuated by genre and sub-genre can and will be cast aside when the subject is the Melvins, they played rock and they played it heavily, with one of the most unique, brutal, and criminally overlooked percussionists ever to play the drum set in Dale Crover, and of course the bestial riffology and soaring vocals of King Buzz-O. I don’t know what ungodly key the Melvins are tuned to here, but it’s low as fuck, thick and rich, in other words, fucking tasty. This is a band whose take on rock music could possibly be likened to that of an abstract visual artist. Utter disdain for conventionality, check, weird arrangements, check, a threesome of weirdos who couldn’t seem to be much farther outside of society, well, see for yourself, but the strange cosmos of the Melvins is simply not for the faint of heart. That drum fill that starts off the second track, “Anaconda,” man that just fuckin rules, so heavy, so badass. Not only is Dale C’s performance on Bullhead stellar but the production of his drums is crisp and clear, complete with punchy kicks and a tight, popping snare drum, and of course the floor toms of doom. “Ligature” is a plodding contrarian, perhaps a sonic expression of the frustration and misery induced by the mind numbing aspects of the mundane world, i.e. going to work, waiting in line, you know, things that suck. The song is strangely juxtaposed to “It’s Shoved,” one of the oddest songs in the Melvins catalogue. What makes it so odd is that is such a straight-forward rock and roll diddly, starting with an almost pop drum beat from Crover, which is soon accompanied by a light palm-muted riff and a slightly schizoid vocal styling from King B. The tune builds to moderately heavy rock but almost feels like Melvins lite; not to worry, it’s over in two and a half minutes.

“Zodiac” is one of the heaviest and thrashiest titles in the Melvins’ vast repertoire. The opening riff is like some kind of down tuned gutter punk “Symptom of the Universe” which morphs into some fearsome power chord riffage, only to return to that gut wrenching bend again and again. “OH YEAH!” Buzz laments over a doomy haze of distortion, “I forgot to get my pills! I got to go downtown!” Perhaps the maniacal babbling at the start of “If I Had an Exorcism” is the effect of whatever dementia warrants such a prescription of pills, I don’t know, but whatever these guys were on, I want a lot of it. The drum-driven “You’re Blessened” marches on underneath guitar crunch/feedback/Hendrix-ish wankery, until culminating in a crescendo of what seems to be a sort of bombastic declaration of blessening, ordained by the minister Buzz-O, sounding his barbaric yawp for good and all. “Cow” is the closing track, a nice and heavy number whose opening moments give a little taste of the Melvins’ sometimes noticeable KISS influence. What makes this song special is that Dale Crover takes over at about 1:30 and brutally ejects us from the private garden party that is Bullhead with some tastefully rude solo bludgeoning.

This album is an absolute must for any Melvins fan. It is also a worthy and proper introduction to Buzz-O and Dale C if you’re new to the Melvins. Bullhead captures the band at a youthful and rocking point in their career, a time before the major label debauchery, undoubtedly one of the clearest representations of their legacy.

Bonebreaking downtuned hymns - 90%

cinedracusio, April 11th, 2006

There is a thing that has always amazed me about Melvins. No matter what genres they switch and no matter what compositional type they would adopt, you could never blame them for trying too hard to be heavy or convincing and actually NOT succeeding in doing it.
There is sludge metal. And there are Melvins. Actually, I expected the first track to be fucking heavy, considering that mad rice eaters from Boris got their name from it. This opener is a great example of the primal slamming half-baked drone that Melvins are able of pulling out of their pocket. Dale Crover sounds extremely precise in his execution, and he still doesn't hurry the tempo at all. For almost 6 minutes, a snail-paced sludgy riff slashes and carves through pounding obsessive rhythms and audible (not slap) bass lines. Very noticeable is also the change in Buzz Osbourne's vocal register. Unlike the drunken, agressive and muddy execution found on 10 Songs and Gluey Porch Treatments, King Buzzo got a higher, clearer tone, which starts getting really similar to the other Osbourne. After a small but healthy dose of sludge riff jamming everything gets silent, and the last 2 minutes of the song are punctured by the main riff played on bass and Buzzo's mumbled, almost comical vocal exorcisms.
Anaconda is much shorter, and starts off a little quicker, with a more menacing and dynamic guitar riff, and the drums follow a weirder and more complex rhythmic register. Buzz reaches almost absurdly high notes (at least compared, as I said, to his past performances).
Ligature is one of my favourite tracks on this album. Starting off with almost tribal sounding drums and a severely downtuned riff, the real song begins only at above 1 minute and the vocal theatricals are simply delightful. However, the melodic and vocal parts are removed at the 2:40 mark, letting Dale to play a huge drum part (reminding strongly in its structure by Edgar Varese's "Ionisation"!) backed by powerful guitar feedback.
It's Shoved follows a grungier side, with a rhythm reminiscent of Nirvana and a more energic and less downtuned side of Melvins and Osbourne taking over a quicker vocal performance.
Zodiac. Damn, this is more Black Sabbath than Black Sabbath!!! Believe me, I am not fucking around. The beginning riff simply screams Black Sabbath worship, not to mention a psychedelically-tinged execution in drumming provided by a monster Crover. In the second half, everything slows down, going into a punishing hypnotic riff and even crazier in the vocal domain, with Buzz doing his almost over-the-top incantations.
If I Had An Exorcism was somewhat difficult to me, because it possessed less drumming sequences and wrapped in dizzying guitar high notes experimentation, having Buzz whispering something in the background.
Your Blessened had a milder approach, more jamming, actually I think that it had more jamming than any other track here, and contains a proper lead in it, so I liked it a lot.
Cow ends this album on a high note, the guitars and the vocals fade out very soon (just like on Leech from Gluey Porch Treatments), but everything ends with aprox. 2 minutes of Clover's drum improvisation.
My only real disappointment is that this lasts not too much, but who knows, maybe good perfumes have to come in small doses. Kids who are drooling over Earth, Sunn O))), Eyehategod and Boris, listen to Bullhead and Lysol and see who started the drone thing. Kaputt.