Mudhoney played a little Sub Pop party at the Sunset on
Wednesday, May 14, opening up for current local hotshots Fleet
Foxes, as part of the label’s ongoing, world-dominating 20th
anniversary (all of which culminates July 11 to 13 with the SP20
Festival at Marymoor Park in Redmond and the Moore Theatre in Seattle).
Mudhoney were never one of my favorite bands as a teenager growing up
in the grunge afterglow of the mid ’90s, so catching them in the
intimate confines of the Sunset doesn’t do as much for me as it might
for some, just as the Green River reunion scheduled for the SP20 looks
too far back to trigger anything like personal nostalgia.
Still, the band put on a pretty rousing show for some 20-plus-year
(band age, not band-member age) rock veterans. Mark Arm, when not
playing second guitar, pulled some vintage punk/hardcore frontman
moves—leaning forward on one leg and gripping the mic with
two hands like he was throwing his whole weight into it, howling, or
stalking around the stage, lanky and surly. Bassist Guy Maddison
thumped out steady, aggressive rhythms belied by his occasional wide,
amiable grinning; when the bass dropped out here and there he would
grab his beer for a quick swig. Guitarist Steve Turner and drummer Dan
Peters were obscured from view from my spot in the crowd, but they were
more than audible, especially Turner’s squealing feedback. The only
song I immediately recognized in their set was “In ‘n’ Out of Grace”;
they didn’t play “Touch Me I’m Sick.”
This week, Sub Pop is rereleasing Mudhoney’s Superfuzz
Bigmuff as a deluxe edition, packaged with a booklet of photos
and appreciative new liner notes on the band as well as a bonus disc of
live performances from 1988 recorded in Berlin and Santa Barbara, as
well as the band’s new album, their ninth, The Lucky Ones. The
first disc of Superfuzz wouldn’t play on my laptop for some
reason, but disc two suggests that the band’s live show hasn’t changed
or diminished too much in the past couple decades—they still loom
large, loud, and fuzzy; Arm still yowls and sneers like a young
punk—even if they no longer end their set with the sweet sequence
of “Here Comes Sickness,” “Touch Me I’m Sick,” and “In ‘n’ Out of
Grace.”
Their new album, on the other hand, hints at how the band may have
grown in the past 20 years—it’s sonically cleaner, fuzz all
expertly controlled, and lyrically maybe a little wiser and a little
less wise-ass. They played a handful of the album’s songs at the Sunset
on Wednesday—the paranoid, disoriented “I’m Now” and the
nose-diving title track sounded particularly searing.
I’m still most excited about the reunited Vaselines for SP20,
but maybe it’s not too late to catch up with Mudhoney and company, too.
