The Melvins ‘A Walk With Love and Death’

Words by Russell Carstens

Kurt Cobain’s favorite band sure has been busy lately. In 2016, they released two albums, Basses Loaded and Three Men and a Baby. On their twenty-fifth album, A Walk With Love and Death (also the soundtrack to a film of the same name) the Melvins may leave even their most devoted fans scratching their heads. Trademark Melvins creepiness? Check. Patiently built atmospheres of doom? You got it. But the more film-score-esque sounds are where the band does something they truly haven’t done before (at least to this degree).

Over half of the tracks are comprised of static/noise/spoken word collages that can only be described as the peril of a poor person stuck in a time warp or parallel dimension who can’t find their way back home, fiddling with whatever contraption got them there, while thinking out loud about how they got there—“Must be the drugs…” And in that weirdness, it’s Melvins as heck.