The Bride Screamed Murder

Twenty-five years into their career, and with somewhere between 15 and 20 studio albums released, Melvins are showing no signs of letting up just yet. With the fairly recent introduction of Big Business bods Coady Willis and Jared Warren into the fold they've been releasing some of their best work with (A) Senile Animal and Nude With Boots. The Bride Screamed Murder is a slight feint away from the two albums that preceded it, but it is, nevertheless, distinctly Melvins.

From the first 90 seconds of The Bride Screamed Murder (the sort of trashy B-movie title perfect for the group's school-binder-metal MO), it seems like this most recent incarnation of the Melvins-- longtime mainstays Buzz Osborne and Dale Crover, backed by Big Business' Jared Warren and Coady Willis-- is content to stay the course and follow the return-to-form lead of their last two albums. That said, staying the course isn't exactly what the Melvins are best known for, so while the transformation of "The Water Glass" mid-track from state-of-the-art sludge into an honest-to-goodness marching song is unexpected, the fact that the Melvins opted to switch gears isn't a shocker. After all, it's following those sorts of counterintuitive impulses, for better (various B-sides from their 1997 AmRep singles collection) or worse (their Leif Garrett-flavored cover of "Smells Like Teen Spirit"), that make this band worth a damn as it proudly trudges into its third decade.