Album Review: Mudhoney, Digital Garbage

Pre and post-grunge stalwarts Mudhoney’s latest album makes no great departure from previous outings: there’s no “hope you like our new jazz direction.” The drums sound as though Dan Peters was recorded playing them while being dragged under a bus, and the guitar solos might well have been made up on the spot – with the encouragement of a cattle prod. Meanwhile, Mark Arm yelps and barks like he just stood on a piece of lego. In a good way.

Swipes and jabs are taken at various – often disturbing – facets of modern life that are currently zeitgeisting: mass shootings, social media, religious fanaticism etc. ‘Nerve attack’ kicks off like Iggy’s ‘I’m Bored’, swiftly underlining Mudhoney’s Stoogian debt of influence. ‘Please Mr Gunman’ is a, polite I assume, request to the titular shooter that, given the choice, ”we’d rather die in church.”

You’d be forgiven for thinking that ‘Next Mass Extinction’ is a riff on the same subject, but this time it’s the whole human-race that is at risk. ‘Kill Yourself Live’ comments sardonically on the trend to take Warhol’s aphorism to its morbid and ultimate conclusion: broadcast your suicide on Facebook while anticipating the uplikes. Your 15 minutes are counting down. Oh and, “Use a filter with bunny ears” recommends Arm, “… you’ll live on in digital garbage.”

In the current musical climate where rock – depending on your point of view – is either redundant or going underground, Mudhoney fit the latter definition perfectly in kicking tirelessly against the pricks.

7/10

Out now.