How Melvins Ignored the Critics With ‘Hostile Ambient Takeover’

King Buzzo did not let destructive evaluations cease him from believing within the Melvins‘ Hostile Ambient Takeover.

“Plenty of individuals hate it. It acquired some actually nasty evaluations,” he recalled within the liner notes for a vinyl reissue. “I keep in mind taking part in the completed album in its entirety for a buddy of mine from New Zealand, and he simply sat staring on the audio system with a damage look on his face for the total 45-minute length.”

Somewhat than taking this suggestions as an indication to return to the drafting board, the Melvins launched the LP as is. “I knew he was fallacious,” Buzzo explains. “I would not change a goddamn factor about it.”

Launched on April 16, 2002, two years after the band’s bold The Maggot / The Bootlicker / The Crybaby trilogy, Hostile Ambient Takeover supplied a whirlwind tour via a wide range of types, from the quick rockabilly-on-amphetamines blast of “Dr. Geek” via the slow-crawling 16-minute closing epic “The Anti-Vermin Seed.”

“The Idiot, The Meddling Fool” begins off as one of many album’s extra conventional Melvins sludgy riff-fests earlier than taking a sudden left flip into warped synth-pop. The frenzied “The Mind Heart at Whipples,” which takes its title from a beloved Twilight Zone episode, rides a guitar riff that sounds just like the bizarre, barely creepy uncle of the one which opens Stevie Nicks‘ “Fringe of Seventeen.”

Hearken to Melvins Carry out ‘The Mind Heart at Whipples’

Buzzo, drummer Dale Crover and bassist Kevin Rutmanis are joined on numerous tracks by Instrument guitarist Adam Jones and multi-instrumentalist David Scott Stone, who add texture and depth with analog synthesizers, thunder sheets and different uncommon devices.

Hostile Ambient Takeover can be the LP the place the Melvins started their lengthy working relationship with engineer / mixer Toshi Kasai. “These guys aren’t afraid to be totally different,” Kasai mentioned of the band in a 2021 Tape Op interview. “That perspective completely mirrored my thought of constructing music. Working for different, mainstream, greater individuals, I do not know what number of occasions I needed to give up. Then the Melvins confirmed up and it was like, ‘That is it!'”

Buzzo concludes: “I sincerely imagine [Hostile Ambient Takeover] is among the greatest issues we have ever finished. We’re actually happy with it and it has stood the take a look at of time.”

Initially launched solely on vinyl, Hostile Ambient Takeover arrived as a sequence of seven” singles, with one of many album’s songs on aspect A, backed by newly recorded covers of Alice Cooper‘s “Return of the Spiders,” Mott the Hoople‘s “Jerkin’ Krokus” and tracks by Ramones, the Gun Membership and the Tubes. The album obtained a correct 12″ reissue in 2021, with the B-sides collected onto a separate vinyl launch, Hostile Ambient Moreover.