Melvins, Boris Revel in Heaviness at Tipitina's

The Melvins onstage at Tipitina’s, by Steven Hatley

During NOLA x NOLA, the “Twins of Evil” tour played to a packed house, and heaviness was the answer to every question.

Guitars, bass and drums are so thoroughly integrated into rock ’n’ roll’s bones that it’s easy to miss avant-garde gestures in that space. Punk was one, and when Boris and The Melvins played Tipitina’s recently, we heard another. Both bands share heavy metal’s love of loud, distorted, hard music, but neither shows any obvious interest in power, which is too often the subtext in metal. Heaviness is its own reward, and both asked the musical question, what has to be there to make heavy music heavy.

The Melvins emerged out of the grunge era and were briefly signed by Atlantic Records during the period where every major label hoped to sign the next Nirvana. The Melvins, like Sonic Youth, were really fellow travelers though, experimental bands who weren’t afraid to turn it up and make an unruly noise. It helped that The Melvins’ Buzz Osborne knew Kurt Cobain from his.early days.

That signing says how poorly Atlantic understood those bands because Nirvana was really all about songs, while The Melvins basically dispose of them. They frequently do away with the chorus altogether. Melody isn’t a priority, but neither is punk’s kinetic energy or adrenalized tempos. Their albums often feel like provocations, like slow, bad trips, and that carries over to their shows, where they rarely do anything that would make things easy for their fans.

Buzz Osborne of The Melvins, by Steven Hatley

Still, New Orleans has been a good place for The Melvins, and the band’s stop at Jed’s in 1987 changed the course of New Orleans music. Garrett Gravely wrote in the Dallas Observer about how members of New Orleans’ heavy music scene were there.

Jimmy Bower from Down, Crowbar and Eyehategod once said, “If I had to define one album that changed my life, it would have to be the Melvins’ Gluey Porch Treatments.” When Bower first heard the record in 1987, he played the cassette to his Crowbar and Down bandmate Kirk Windstein on the way to and from band rehearsals. Another stalwart of the New Orleans metal and punk scene, Phil Anselmo, would later introduce Gluey Porch Treatments to his bandmates in Pantera.

Tipitina’s was sold out for the show, and as part of the conceit of the tour, the band played its 1991 album Bullhead in its entirety. The album was chosen in part because it includes “Boris,” the song that gave Boris its name, but it illustrated what makes The Melvins work. The show is far more musical than might be obvious because the connection between the band members is everything. The Melvins aren’t a jam band, but the interplay between Osborne, bassist Steven McDonald, and drummer Coady Willis (filling in for long-time Melvin Dale Crover, who had to miss the tour due to spinal surgery) create movement inside compositions that are superficially stagnant. Songs seemingly ground on until they landed on a final chord that, after a brief pause, started the next song. That created the impression that the songs were all in the same key, and they were played slowly enough to make listeners uncomfortable, particularly as they went on without build or crescendo. .  that the set ground along at tempos slow enough to spur a little anxiety, seemingly all in one key with no obvious build or crescendo. But the anxiety, the frustration, the refusal to play ball is the surface of The Melvins’ game. Listen more closely and you heard McDonald’s unconventional journeys on his bass, and groove-like rhythms set up by Willis that moved with and independent of the rest of the band. The way they interacted gave the set an anti-hippie psychedelic tint.

After 50 or so minutes, McDonald announced that they were about to start their last song, surprising fans who thought that by skipping the opener, they had passed on Boris. In fact, they missed Mr. Phylzzz, and because it was a co-headlining tour, the Japanese band co-headlining the tour hadn’t played yet. Some Melvins’ faithful drifted out, but they missed a very different exploration of heavy music. Boris played its 2002 album Heavy Rocks in its entirety, which didn’t have the same wow factor for an audience that didn’t know the album as well. No one was lost, though. The words weren’t the selling point, and the music made clear, linear sense. There was none of the Melvins’ weirdness. Instead, their music answered the musical question, “What would one of car customizer Big Daddy Roth’s monsters listen to on its 8-track while driving one of souped-up creations?”

Rather than test their audience’s patience, Boris gave them rock ’n’ roll at its molecular level. The licks Wata played on her Les Paul (what else?) could have been slowed down, bulked up Angus Young basics, signifying rock ’n’ roll’s conceptual ideal by valuing the sonic roar over the licks that produced it. Visually, Takeshi similarly embodied a Camaro rock icon with a double-necked Rickenbacher with a bass neck and a six-string guitar neck. In an ideal, international world, Boris would inspire the 21st century of Heavy Metal Parking Lot as they take rock ’n’ roll’s DNA and run it through a series of pedals that eventually lead to a stack of Orange amps that tower over them. Because they also strip out the hooks and most of the catchy parts, Boris’ rock drones pretty effectively. But more importantly, it rocks.

Boris onstage at Tipitina’s, by Steven Hatley

Steven Hatley’s photos inadvertently make something clear. Their faces were rarely well lit because unlike most American rock and pop, Boris’ music isn’t about Boris. They’re the vehicles through which the rock flows. Wata’s guitar isn’t an extension of her personality; she just sets it in motion and the rock does the rest. Even the album title—Heavy Rock—sounds more like a genre or a statement of purpose than an individual marker, and in fact it isn’t. They’ve used it three times.    

And it worked. Not for everybody, as some of the curious slowly drifted out, but the mosh pit and crowd surfers churned on. The music was trippy, not lysergically so, but the wall of distortion created a sonic haze from which songs might have emerged. Like The Melvins, Boris were relentless. They put the inner life of four bars of, say, “Walk This Way,” under a microscope to see what its component parts are and how much rock they carry on their own.