Messed!Up
Today’s show was Originally planned to take place at Große Freiheit which surprised me, as I had seen Melvins before quite a few times – but always at the much much smaller Logo. A few days before the show I realised it had been moved to Markthalle (size-wise a happy medium between the cramped sweatbox of Logo and the biggish Große Freiheit. A wise choice!)
Redd Kross kicked things off, with the Melvins’ Steven McDonald and Dale Crover pulling double duty tonight on bass and drums respectively. I slipped in mid-set (or so I thought) and caught them firing off hooky alt-rock that couldn’t be further from tonight’s sludgy main course – yet the Hamburg crowd, slow to warm on a humid summer night, was nodding and singing along. Not bad for a bunch of 60-somethings still playing like teenagers and grinning from ear to ear.
After an extensive set almost as long as the main act’s, the lights dropped, and the unstoppable force that is the Melvins took over: Tonight as a four-piece, playing a two-drummer summer. From the first note, it was a sledgehammer to the senses – thick riffs, dual-drummer thunder, and King Buzzo in full command. The sound was crushing, hypnotic, unstoppable. Drum-offs between Dale Crover and Coady Willis (of Big Business and High on Fire fame) shook the walls, while riffs crawled and crashed like tectonic plates shifting underfoot.
The lighting? Minimal. The musicianship? Monumental. Slow. Heavy. A perfect wall of sound. Maybe the best Melvins set Hamburg has ever seen; definitely the best one I’ve seen! An ecstatic celebration of pure sludge power that left ears ringing, hearts pounding and the audience longing for more. But after a little over an hour, the fun was already over.
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Photographer: Christian Berg
