With some bands, you just wish they'd give up and retire. Their creative juices have long since bubbled away. Geezerhood and irrelevance should have naturally come to these artists years ago, but media momentum and a devoted enough fan base keep their withered husks going through the motions. Sure they did some great work back in the day, but they hoover it up now.
Why does anybody want to pay to see an 85 year-old Mick Jagger shake his wrinkled old arthritic ass, while Keith Richards uses controlled rigor mortis to make his undead corpse control his guitar. Have the Stones produced anything of musical value since the late 70's? What the hell are they doing playing sold out stadium? They should be in geriatric care fer chrissakes, not a tour bus.
Moving a little closer to the subject of this review, look at Pearl Jam. These guys had one good album with their debut Ten (two if you liked Vs, which I didn't). After this, it was a gradual and steady decline in the quality of their output, and the entertainment level of their shows, until we're left with a band that's nothing but a Naderite ad campaign with a whiney, Mohawk-topped frontman. Yet they persevere and continue to make albums and tour long after we all stopped caring. Why?
To many of us who grew up in the midst of the early 90's Seattle music scene, Mudhoney were the finest of old-guard Seattle rockers. With their fuzzed-out guitars and blues-tinged sound, Mudhoney invented what would later be called "Grunge", a label that would later be used to describe nearly every band coming out of Seattle in the 90's, regardless of how grungy they actually sounded (how did Vedder and Co. get wrapped into this bunch?). Still, while dozens of Seattle bands were hitting the mainstream left and right, the boys of Mudhoney were left relatively ignored.
While Kurt Cobain was getting felated by the world and hating it, Mudhoney was working hard and releasing the landmark Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge on SubPop. The band was prolific throughout the 90's, with a number of great side projects as well (for one of the greatest albums of the last decade, check out the first album from Mark Arm and Steve Turner's side band Monkeywrench). As Grunge was being pronounced dead, they released what is still my favorite of their albums (although many fans disagree with me on this), My Brother The Cow on Reprise (the label that dropped them after ‘98's Tomorrow Hit Today)
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