JELLO BIAFRA WITH THE MELVINS

Don’t breathe what you can’t see

CD/2LP, Alternative Tentacles

Hell, its says Jello Biafra WITH the Melvins right there on the front cover and that means, Melvins play the band for Biafra. And if you remember correctly, The Melvins started out as a fast, trashy hardcore band back in the days (Ozma and earlier, and only got weird with Bullhead) so what the heck did you expect? Of course, there is no experiments on here, just crunchy, heavy, grooving hardcore punk. The sheer power of two very heavy forces combined. If you want experiments, check out the Melvins / Lustmord-CD “Pigs of the Roman Empire” or the “Hostile Ambient Takeover” or “Millenium Monsterwork” with Fantomas (all released on Ipecac). Or just go and get everything by the Melvins you can get your hands on. Then go and buy all those old Dead Kennedys records[1]. It’ll be good for you.

Anyways, The Melvins prove that they are able to churn out some great punkriffs as harsh and tight and crunchy as you want them to be. Instant fistshaking and headbanging involved. Like the heavy punkrock-thunder that has been amiss so sadly for so long while having to endure washed-down popshit like you-name-‘em. Musically, I’d compare these tracks – mostly written by either Biafra and Osbourne together or one of them alone – to a fierce, aggressive animal stuffed into a big sack and dropped into room filled with a bunch of people. There the sack jerks and jumps as the monster inside wants to get out and the people in the room sense the imminent danger and back off. The Melvins stand in perfectly as an updated version of one the best punkrock styles ever conceived – if they do it for fun, for fandom or out of respect for Jello Biafra is a judgement, I’ll leave to you. There is some metal in the music and some Sabbath-style, but mainly it is like a welcome reminder of what the Dead Kennedys could do physically.

And then there is Jello Biafra, who is still, and probably always will, shouts out his pissed, razor-sharp and very cynic worldviews at the most obvious targets and some more surprising ones. The right-swing in the US opens up worlds of opportunities for Biafra to spout his views. Once you have announced yourself as the leftwing punkrock-preacher, there is no easy way getting off that. But the issues handed to him are surreally realistic at times as well. Like the electro-shock-device invented for punishing / curing sexual perverts and approved by General Attorney John Ashcroft. The wicked humour of Biafra comes out in the last sentence of “Plethysmograph”, when he sings “so I can let my eagle soar” – a direct hint at John Ashcrofts stage-performance singing “Let The Eagle Soar” (as you have all seen in Fahreinheit 9/11) I am sure). Another obvious target is the trend to monster SUV’s in “Yuppie Cadillac”, which might be seen in the tradition of DK’s “Winnebago Warrior”.

But Biafra is no idiot and he knows how to use words well. For instance in the anti-religious-fanaticism-song (or rather the song about what is happening in the US after 9/11 and the religious right wing taking over the intellectual, philosophical and ethical leadership in that country) “Caped Crusader”. The title already is a hint at the KuKluxKlan, who like to see themselves in the tradition of the Spanish Crusaders, driving out the infidels and cleaning them in the sword and the fire. Though the Spanish crusaders were in Southern America, but historical or scientifical correctness never mattered much in scenes, were people are still convinced that god actually really moulded mankind from clay and that evolution is a satanistic scam. Biafra takes their arguments of Christian fundamentalists towards terrorists to their consequent and end and finishes off the song with “God is great / god is love / we must kill the infidels”. Yeah, right on! … Uh, wait, isn’t that the same thing those Islamic terroists say? Uhm…

The same way he turns the trenchcoated children’s logo for homeland security “McGruff The Crime Dog” into the emblematic evil intruder into privacy and the grime destroyer of civil rights. Unlike a lot of other punk-lyrics, Biafra is way beyond the, on the one hand, enigmatic and cryptic personal lyrics that transport the anger and emotionality via their meta-levels, and, on the other hand, the fuck-all sloganism and three-chord-rethoric of punkrock. I mean, who else than Biafra would dare to boil the whole post-9/11-shenanigangs into this simple almost-Haiku: “Thank you Osama, you are the savior of our economy today.” A little unexpected though is the open self-reflection of Biafra in “Enchanted Thoughtfist”, which is all about introspection and having concerns about his own legacy. After all, who made Biafra a spokesperson for anything – except he himself. So why is he more apt to speak out than the rest of us? Well, the song ends on “Start your own fire / bring your own fire”: Check.

All in all this release, the number 300 on Alternative Tentacles, and who would have thought that AT would still remain for so long and after so much trouble, is a great piece of punkrock. Especially for all those Biafra-Fans, who had to wait long years for original music by Biafra (some album by LARD being the last I can remember. All I miss a little are the vast and crazy collages of newspaper-tidbits and illustrations from the Fifties and Sixties that grazed those timeless classics on AT. Such as the collaboration of Biafra with DOA, still one of the best records to date, as you can read elsewhere in these pages. Final word is: great stuff.

P.S.: Funny how no-one as of yet has noticed upon the funny irony in the title of that record. Actually, you can’t help but breathe, what you can’t see.