MUDHONEY, Fulham Greyhound, London
Melody Maker, April 8th 1989
by Simon Reynolds
Tonight,
Mudhoney are a chastening experience for me. And, as our "emergent
underground" hardens into homogeneity, as certain ideas congeal into a
new orthodoxy, so I expect to have more and more encounters as schizoid
as this one. See, Mudhoney tonight managed the singular feat of being
utterly entertaining, and yet, at some deeper level, tedious beyond
belief. I was bored, almost literally, to the brink of tears.
That
a band can be this urgent, and yet so uninvolving, this frenzied, and
yet so ultimately immobile, this charged, and yet so fundamentally lazy,
is a testament to some kind of dire deadlock. The moment has passed, an
impasse has been reached. It would be more rewarding to watch someone struggle, uncomfortably and unsuccessfully, to get to some beyond, than to witness something as consummate as Mudhoney.
For
Mudhoney are immaculate. Every thrust, rip, rent, howl, jut and jive is
perfectly placed, and asserts, with a conviction that's utterly
convinving, that punk's not dead. And I don't mean some
privileged moment in '76, but punk as Lester Bangs invented it, the bad
boy trash lineage that runs from rockabilly, through Sixties garage,
Seventies gumbo metal to contemporary thrash. It's alive and burning
still. Mudhoney have the riffs, the songs, the vehemence, the
attitude,
the windmilling longhair, the witticisms ... "I'll give $50 to the
first guy to come onstage and throw his guts up", "we're not playing
another song until they erect a stage barrier", "we're tired of all you
over-active young people, let's have some old people up the front
now" ... They've only just begun and already they're washed up, standing
still at a point of perfection, giving the people what they want,
fitting our talk without testing it, meeting our need without
stretching it.
"Mud
Ride" tells the oldest story in hardcore, abduction and murder, froths
at the mouth about "taking you any place/there's no place to hide", but
no one here is remotely endangered. It's a scenario that's already
becoming as cosy as the ritual narratives of heavy metal or Oi.
Maybe
Mudhoney exhaust me because every word they incite in my mind feels
tired and tame in the mouth. Maybe that's just my problem. But maybe -
and it's worth considering - the teen sicko raving bloody mess-thetic is
spent. Maybe trash is just trash. Sonic Youth have reinvented New York
as a city of ghosts. Spacemen 3 have turned to ether. Pixies are now
sculpted in five dimensions. So far, Mudhoney have set things up so that
their only future is as the oldest teenagers in town. What they do,
nobody does better. Do we need it anymore?
No comments:
Post a Comment