:: Mudhoney – Plastic Eternity (album, Sub Pop)
TODAY is Good Friday: it's also definitely a good Friday to be a Mudhoney fan, and indeed to be Mudhoney the band: not only have the Seattle grunge survivors got a brand-new record out for you to enjoy, the fabulous Plastic Eternity (more about which in a moment), but April 7 2023 has also been declared the first ever Mudhoney Day by King County, the largest county in the quartet’s home State of Washington.
I’m not quite sure what the latter news actually entails for the veteran outfit and Noise Annoys favourites, who are currently celebrating their 35th year with the release of their 11th album, but surely at a bare minimum it should require all King County residents to listen exclusively to Mudhoney for the entire 24-hour period or risk crippling fines and/or imprisonment, while also entitling Mark Arm (guitar/vox), Steve Turner (guitar), Dan Peters (drums) and Guy Maddison (bass) to cool stuff like discounted meals, free beer, unlimited free bus travel and buy-one-get-one-free on all pet foods and treats.
Mudhoney are dog lovers, you see, and they’ve gone fully mutt mad with the brand new music video showcasing Plastic Eternity’s final track, Little Dogs, a pleasingly off-kilter pop tune celebrating – you got it – the joy of keeping company with compact canines.
Written by drummer Dan Peters, it’s a disarmingly cutesy affair from an outfit whose most notable lyrical reference to Man’s Best Friend up to this point was the icky metaphorical line “all the neighbourhood dogs, sniffin’ at her crotch” from their piledriving devil woman anthem Here Comes Sickness.
“They make me happy and I laugh when they howl - if you let ‘em outside at night, watch out for owls,” advises Arm, whose very own former foster dog turned constant companion, Rory Russell the Pomeranian, stars alongside him in the video and indeed the press shots for the new record.
As with Oh Yeah, their upbeat ode to the joys of surfing and skateboarding which capped-off their previous LP, 2018’s Digital Garbage, it’s nice of Mudhoney to end Plastic Eternity on a bright and breezy note like Little Dogs, because quite a lot of the other songs on the record are darker in mood with lyrics highlighting the absolute bin fire that is modern life, from climate disaster and anti-vaxxers to the rampant corruption infesting the corridors of power worldwide.
The serrated, vocoder and organ-enhanced stop/go riffage of Plasticity joins the dots between environmental pollution and 21st century superficiality, while Cry Me An Atmospheric River finds Arm actually taking the POV of climate disaster itself, gleefully casting it as a vengeful god “turning the Earth into the planet of the damned” that's literally raining down bomb cyclone-based wrath upon the idiots who “just can’t stop polluting” as the band crank out a filthy psychedelic blues boogie.
Fuzzed-out groover Here Comes The Flood takes the mickey out of morons wilfully ingesting horse worming tablets to ward off Covid, delightfully eerie apocalyptic ballad Cascades of Crap condemns the relentless consumerism fuelling our impending doom, Human Stock Capital offers a furious punk rock reminder that we’re all just credit-rated cattle to our capitalist overlords, and Severed Dreams in The Sleeper Cell switches off between slow ‘n’ woozy and loud 'n' frustrated to fine effect.
Recent singles Move Under and Almost Everything showcase the ease with which Mudhoney can shift between dirty, three-chord rock and roll catchiness and a more expansive, psychedelia-informed attack (complete with bongos), while Tom Herman's Hermits finds them expertly pulling both together (minus the bongos) for a fun and funky, wah-wah-addled ode to the Pere Ubu founder.
Contemplative space rock odyssey One or Two is a stand-out tune on Plastic Eternity, one of three for which producer Johnny Sangster receives a songwriting credit, the others being the aforementioned Almost Everything and Cry Me An Atmospheric River. He seems to help bring out the weirder, more experimental side of their sound - though they manage that pretty well unaided on the lurching, Moog-propelled sprawl/scrawl of Flush The Fascists.
"Everyone tells me, it's nice to have me back - I can't tell that I'm unsure where I'm at," croons Arm on the album opener Souvenir of My Trip, a lumbering synth-enhanced head-nodder with a big powerful rip of a chorus and oodles of wailing guitar abuse that should reassure listeners that he and the rest of the band are right where they need to be.
Indeed, toiling at the coalface of garage punk psychedelia might be a dirty job, but Plastic Eternity proves Mudhoney are more than able for it.
Be sure to take Mudhoney Day international by listening via your favourite streaming service and ordering yourself a physical copy of Plastic Eternity on non-biodegradable Loser Edition LP, CD and/or cassette via mudhoneyloser.bigcartel.com.
:: Friday Fest at Oh Yeah Belfast
FINALLY for this week's thrilling installment of Noise Annoys, a reminder that local music fans are in for a long and loud Good Friday down at Oh Yeah in Belfast this evening, where the Mob Wife-organised Friday Fest will be supplying a multi-band bill guaranteed to get your Easter off to an entertaining, ear-ringing start from 6pm til late.
The Belfast trio will be joined by headliners Axis Of plus Problem Patterns, Fruity, Yinyang, Susi Pagel, Jock and Tessio, which is a fine and varied line-up by anyone's estimation.
Tickets were still available in advance at time of press via ohyeahbelfast.com, priced at a very reasonable £14. That's only (counts on fingers) £1.75 per act, which is damn fine value for money - sure £14 would barely buy you an Easter egg these days.
