“Tarantula Heart” – Melvins

Album: Tarantula Heart

Artist: Melvins

Year: 2024

Genre: Experimental Rock, Heavy Metal

Grade: B+

Either you like the Melvins or you don’t, and their 27^th studio album, Tarantula Heart, isn’t going to change your mind. Nonetheless, opening the album with an experimental, sludgy, mechanical 19-minute epic called “Pain Equals Funny” will help you decide pretty quick. Whatever your thoughts might be, let it be known that Tarantula Heart is the Melvins’ best album in nearly 20 years: King Buzzo and the boys haven’t sounded this fresh in a long, long time.

“Pain Equals Funny” is the obvious centerpiece, a piece that starts off conventionally before devolving into a noisy psychedelic breakdown, but the four remaining songs are where the band’s eccentricities shine brightest. For example, “Working the Ditch” is an industrial doom metal dirge that brings Melvins back to their classic early days, borne out of Seattle hardcore and NYC no-wave. Meanwhile, fractured rockers like “Allergic to Food” and “Smiler” feature relentlessly free-wheeling guitar acrobatics, letting us know that this is the band’s most avant-garde release in a while.

Throughout the album, the dual drums collapse over each other to create a wholly unique rhythm, one that is equal parts evil and industrial. Those already attuned to Melvins’ wavelength of deconstructed grunge-metal will love the strange and violent sounds of Tarantula Heart, while outsiders will no doubt remain unconvinced by their freaky tendencies.

Personally, I’m a fan of how hard they rock — this is a good record for headbanging, that’s for sure — but I approach Tarantula Heart with caution. It’s no Houdini or Gluey Porch Treatments, but it’ll do.

NOTES & CHORDS

• Each song on Tarantula Heart is a bastardized mix of disparate genres, the strangest one being “She’s Got Weird Arms,” which somehow sounds like a krautrock-metal cross between Faust and Black Sabbath.

• The opening stanza of “Pain Equals Funny” is quite normal by Melvins standards: the first five minutes are powerful, anthemic hard rock. Then, an industrial beat comes in with some metal riffage and things start to get gloriously weird.

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