Melvins - Everybody Loves Sausages

There’s no word that would aptly express what the Melvins have done on Everybody Loves Sausages.

You might be tempted to say that the 13 tracks on the new Melvins record have been “adapted,” “interpreted,” “transformed” or even, if you really want to show off that Arts degree, “transmuted.” But the reality is that to say so would be reductive and untrue. There’s no word that would aptly express what the Melvins have done on Everybody Loves Sausages. Each track is less an adaptation and more an ersatz rendering of the original. Dr. Frankenstein burned calories long into the stormy night and pieced together organs and extremities from human beings to create his own not-quite-human. Now the Melvins have done the same in the recording studio. Cobbling together the expansive detritus of their musical sensibilities, they have created entities that are at once familiar and unnervingly and uncannily alien. Everybody Loves Sausages is the post-modern musical Prometheus.

They infuse sinister atmospherics into the saccharine chiptune furnishings of their cover of Queen’s “You’re My Best Friend”. They turn “Black Betty” into a percussive, oddball beer hall sing-along while keeping it mercifully short. Devastatingly underrated Australian band The Scientists are given that low-end they always needed on “Set It On Fire” and the cover of Bowie’s “Station to Station” is glorious. The vocals are eerily similar to Bowie’s, not like an imitation but rather as though the band has rigged a heavily sedated Bowie up to a car battery and are controlling him with electric shocks. Their Roxy Music cover is just plain creepy. Really, really, really, really creepy—the vocals are performed by Jello Biafra, go figure.

“We really like all of these songs along with the bands who actually wrote this stuff because first and foremost we are huge music fans,” explained King Buzzo. This sentiment is palpable on what is their 300th album (unconfirmed.) Buzz and co. have never relinquished their fandom or their sense of humour. This makes their music something that is simultaneously jocular and illuminative, or in other words, unique. Every release is a gob-spit in the face of taking yourself seriously and a celebration of the garage majesty in which the Melvins revel so exceptionally.

At worst, cover albums breed animosity by making a crutch of familiarity. At best, they offer insight into the source material that the listener could never have fathomed, reminding us of why we need musicians in the first place. In this case, the Melvins have done us one better. In Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, Ron Asheton, when asked about his obsession with Nazism, explained that when his mother used to dry his hair after his evening bath, he could hear a chorus of voices chanting “Sieg heil!” in the gauzy whirring of the blow dryer. On Everybody Loves Sausages, we get to peer through the cosmic keyhole into the minds of Buzz Osborne and Dale Crover and experience the sounds they hear when exposed to the gauzy whirrings of Bowie, The Fugs and Throbbing Gristle. You’d be well-advised to ditch your scruples and partake in the voyeurism. 

(Ipecac Recordings)