About this product

Product Identifiers

Record LabelMusic on Vinyl

UPC8719262006522

eBay Product ID (ePID)4050191635

Product Key Features

FormatVinyl

Release Year1993

GenreRock

TypeLP

ArtistKurt Cobain, Melvins

Release TitleHoudini

Additional Product Features

ReviewsSpin (11/93, p.133) - Highly Recommended - "...A few sections on [HOUDINI] are recorded so hot that the guitar distortion literally breaks up into white noise in your speakers: the hits are classic Melvins tuneage, which means they'll make you wonder if the batteries are going dead in your radio..." Musician (11/93, p.13) - "...[HOUDINI] is a slow-motion barrage of buzzsaw noize apocalypso, with tracks like "Pearl Bomb" achieving a formal brilliance that slams together the Ramones, Stooges, Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham...."

Additional informationMelvins: King Buzzo (vocals, guitar); Dale (vocals, drums); Lorax (bass). Additional personnel: Kurt Cobain (guitar, percussion); Bill Bartell (guitar, bass); Billy Anderson (bass); Al Smith, Mike Supple (percussion). Recorded at Brilliant Studios and Razor's Edge, San Francisco, California; Laundry Room, Seattle, Washington. To essay a concise, surefooted summation of the Melvins' catalog would be reductive at best, and laughable at worst. This is, of course, underground rock's trio of pranksters -- unpredictable and capable of complete musical about-faces in the turn of a measure. That said, Houdini is about as close as one gets to a representative Melvins album, and it vividly captures the band's unreconstructed power, vision, and musical strangeness. During the early-'90s purge of hair rock and candy-footed funk metal, the Melvins, as with many other acts, seemed fair game for a major label in search of another post-Nirvana gold mine. With Kurt Cobain's assistance, the band was snatched up -- and summarily dropped (after three brilliant albums, this being the first) -- by Atlantic. Though Houdini's immediate predecessors, Eggnog and Bullhead, pried open a few screwball chasms in the Melvins' syrupy distillation of Sabbath riffage and Flipper's noisy anti-punk, it was this album that displayed the full fruition of the outfit's sonic breadth, from the cough-syrup river drag of "Night Goat" to the revved-up "Honey Bucket," and from the creepy "Joan of Arc" to the glue-damaged "Sky Pup." Ringleader King Buzzo's riffs are stretched -- taffy-like -- to meltdown, and at other times they are razor sharp. Either way, they abound with a lumbering, lurching power. With their voluminous output and determination to continuously expand their sound regardless of musical trends, the Melvins oeuvre has begun to rival -- at least on paper -- the career arcs of Frank Zappa and Neil Young. ~ Patrick Kennedy

Number of discs1