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Let’s start exactly where we left off last week – Mudhoney and OvO.
Unless you listen to a particular kind of music it’s possible those names mean nothing to you. Fair enough. We are not talking anything resembling mainstream here.
But you will have felt the musical influence of Mudhoney even if they don’t feature on your playlists.
Mudhoney were one of the founding fathers of Seattle’s grunge scene in the early 1990s.
As Mark Deming of AllMusic says: “Nirvana may have been the band that put an entire generation in flannel, and Pearl Jam and Soundgarden both sold a lot more records, but Mudhoney were truly the band that made the 1990s grunge rock movement possible”.
OvO. Photo / Annapaloa Martin
The reason is Mudhoney was the first real success story for Seattle’s Sub Pop Records, the label that released the band’s first single, Touch Me I’m Sick, and their debut EP, Superfuzz Bigmuff, in 1988.
Kurt Cobain listed it as one of his favourite albums in his 1993 journal and that music laid the groundwork for the movement, making Seattle, Washington, the capital of the grunge universe.
October 30
As to the music itself, I’ve heard grunge described as “heavy metal muscle, punk attitude, and garage rock primitivism”. That works for me.
Astonishingly, Mudhoney is coming to The Mount, to the Totara St performance venue, on October 30.
The next night, October 31, at Ōkahukura on Grey St, is the arrival of a delightfully weird and hard to categorise Italian duo called OvO.
Something of a mix of punk, metal, industrial, art, electronica, and several other sub-genres of strange.
This will be the last stop of a New Zealand tour on which they’ll be supported by one of the big beasts of the Tauranga alternative scene, Threat.Meet.Protocol.
Hats off to TMP for scoring such a cool tour.
OvO has always been one of the most active bands in the worldwide ‘noisy rock’ scene. In the last 25 years they have played more than 1000 gigs, released 11 albums and much more.
They comprise singer and guitar player Stefania Pedretti and enormous drummer Bruno Dorella, and sound like nothing I’ve ever heard. The new album, Gemma, is similarly uncategorisable but it certainly makes an impact.
Rather wonderful
Also on the Halloween bill is Hoick and Flogging a Dead One Horse Town.
Plus, here’s a couple of new releases on my radar: Beck has a new album, Ride Lonesome, a beautiful meditation on love and life and a brilliant return to simple songwriting after dancefloor experiments with Pharrell.
Tom Waits has a new release, a collaboration with Massive Attack, and also a spoken word piece of his own titled The Fly. It’s rather wonderful.
OvO. Photo / Nicola Galli
And Elvis Costello is celebrating extravagantly with the 49th anniversary edition of his debut album My Aim Is True, no doubt getting in early before all the punk 50th anniversary releases.
A 35-minute album now covers five CDs, with 104 songs. So much music, so little time...
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