Cute band alert: Mike & the Melvins.
Cute band alert: Mike & the Melvins. Sub Pop

Not only are godheadSilo back on the live front after a long hiatus (at Chop Suey January 29), but their bassist Mike Kunka's long-incubating collaboration with LA metal deities Melvins is finally ready to enter your godforsaken earholes. Titled Three Men and a Baby, Mike & the Melvins' album drops April 1 on Sub Pop. Most of it was recorded in 1999 with producer Tim Green at the controls; Toshi Kasai finished producing the record last year at Sound of Sirens. After the jump you can hear the lead track, "Chicken n Dump," which is much heavier and gnarlier than anything by Mike & the Mechanics. The song bears a slight resemblance to Nirvana's "In Bloom" with its tensile, see-sawing bass line, but "Chicken n Bump" seethes more than it explodes, with Buzz Osbourne's guitar raising welts with sulfuric scrupulousness. What a low and mean cut.

Also after the jump, check out the press release and tracklist.

Three Men and a Baby is the new album by Mike and the Melvins. It was supposed to come out sixteen years ago.

These are the facts we can be sure of: in 1998, around the time his band godheadSilo went on hiatus, bassist/vocalist Mike Kunka busied himself by tagging along on a tour with his friends the Melvins. Somewhere along the way, Mike and the Melvins – King Buzzo (guitar/bass/vocals), Dale Crover (drums/vocals), and Kevin Rutmanis (bass/vocals), at the time – decided to make a record together, and gave the project the imaginative moniker Mike and the Melvins. Sub Pop, ever on the hunt for music’s Next Big Thing, enthusiastically agreed to fund and release the super-group’s debut, and recording commenced sometime in 1999.

It’s at this point that things get hazy. Apparently, one or more of the following happened:

Some “junior-high level bullshit.”
A house was built, a barn was raised, children were born.
Typical record-label skullduggery.
A scorching case of whooping cough.
Surgery. Lots of surgery.
Shocking and poorly-timed gear theft.
Some other stuff, probably, or maybe not.

Three Men and a Baby
Tracklisting:
1. Chicken ‘n’ Dump
2. Limited Teeth
3. Bummer Conversation
4. Annalisa
5. A Dead Pile of Worthless Junk
6. Read the Label (It’s Chili)
7. Dead Canaries
8. Pound the Giants
9. A Friend in Need is a Friend You Don’t Need
10. Lifestyle Hammer
11. Gravel
12. Art School Fight Song