Mudhoney – Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge (30th Anniversary Deluxe Edition) (1991/2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:24:19 minutes | 1,73 GB | Genre: Alternative Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Sub Pop Records
Digitally remastered and expanded two CD edition. By going back to basics with Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge, Mudhoney flipped conventional wisdom. Not for the first time – or the last – they would be vindicated. A month after release in July 1991, the album entered the UK album chart at Number 34 (five weeks later, Nirvana’s Nevermind entered at 36) and went on to sell 75,000 copies worldwide. A more meaningful measure of success, however, lay in it’s revitalization of the band, casting a touchstone for the future. The record is a major chapter in Mudhoney’s ongoing story, the moral of which has to be: when in doubt, fudge it. This 30th anniversary edition, remastered by Bob Weston at Chicago Mastering Service, stands as testimony to the creative surge that drove them in this period. The album sessions yielded a clutch of material that would subsequently appear on B-sides, compilations, and split-singles. This edition includes all those tracks, and a slew of previously unreleased songs, including the entire five-track Music Source session.
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Mudhoney – Plastic Eternity (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 42:06 minutes | 865 MB | Genre: Alternative Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Sub Pop Records
Now well into their fourth decade as both the originators and the last-standing torchbearers of the original wave of Seattle grunge bands, Mudhoney is still snarling and crunching their way through the rolling apocalypse that we call modern life. And while their garage-rock roots are showing more and more, and their tempos have consistently slowed down over the years, the band is no less punk in their approach. Mark Arm’s half-cynical, half-vituperative lyrical approach is still as playful (“Cry Me An Atmospheric River”) as it is political (“Flush the Fascists”), but what’s most interesting about Mudhoney circa 2023 is how their comfort with their musical style has enabled them to be endlessly adventurous within it. There is no band around making music that sounds like Mudhoney, with their combination of a crushing-but-swinging rhythm section and prickly, twangy, slightly sludgy guitar lines. This singularity—along with the band’s beautiful and complete lack of concern for what anyone thinks about what they do—has given Mudhoney considerable latitude to experiment within their own sound, making Plastic Eternity a marvelously varied album. There are, to be sure, plenty of forceful, punk-adjacent jams here: “Move Under” is a 4/4 fuzztone beast and the misinformation-slamming “Here Comes the Flood” sounds like it could be a My Brother the Cow leftover. Yet the album also finds the band flirting with psych-tinged classic rock formalism (“One or Two”) and vocoder-glitchy pogo-punk (“Plasticity”), while two alliteratively titled numbers come back-to-back with downtempo weirdness that’s groove-y and spacey (“Flush the Fascists”) and grinding and dirge-like (“Cascades of Crap”). Near the end of the set, with the rollicking “Little Dogs” gleefully evoking the Stooges, a little bit of early Mudhoney comes shining through, but for the most part, Plastic Eternity is the sound of a band who has fully evolved into its own, weird and wonderful thing.
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