{"product_id":"houdini-4","title":"Houdini","description":"Melvins: King Buzzo (vocals, guitar); Dale (vocals, drums); Lorax (bass).\u003cbr\u003eAdditional personnel: Kurt Cobain (guitar, percussion); Bill Bartell (guitar, bass); Billy Anderson (bass); Al Smith, Mike Supple (percussion).\u003cbr\u003eRecorded at Brilliant Studios and Razor's Edge, San Francisco, California; Laundry Room, Seattle, Washington.\u003cbr\u003eTo 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","brand":"MovieMars","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45532620783903,"sku":"813547021618","price":36.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0679\/7833\/0399\/files\/91e3a11960a389b847bd5deaa1598a75.jpg?v=1777792440","url":"https:\/\/www.moviemars.com\/products\/houdini-4","provider":"MovieMars","version":"1.0","type":"link"}