Album Review: Melvins - Everybody Loves Sausages

A covers album from a band as deliberately abrasive with a black streak of warped humour as Melvins is destined to be a bit of a mixed bag. Yet if you expected a cache of brutality and destruction, you're likely to be disappointed. As Buzz Osbourne states in the liner notes, Everybody Loves Sausages is essentially a peek into the core of the band – their musical influences, aspirations, loves – where it all began.

And with such a disparate group of musicians, the subject matter here is inevitably diverse. Whilst kicking off with an absolute ball-tearer in Venom's Warhead (suitably with Neurosis' Scott Kelly on guitar and vocals), the first, admittedly massive, curveball thrown is a relatively faithful version of Queen's Best Friend, before a dirty take of Black Betty has the band delving into childhood dreams. Mudhoney's Mark Arm jumps on the mic for a killer rendition of The Scientists' Set It On Fire, before the band disappears down the rabbithole with an 11-minute industrial art-noise overhaul of Bowie's Station To Station – sacrilege finetuned into brilliance. Another pop classic is reinterpreted as thrash punk in The Kinks' Attitude (that'd be Blondie's Clem Burke on drums), Jello Biafra helps the weirdness to shine on an excellent version of Roxy Music's In Every Dream A Heartache, and The Jam's Art School slays. Melvins Lite also appear with more obscure cuts such as Divine's Female Trouble (Osbourne doing his best Tom Waits impression), Pop-O-Pies' Timothy Leary Lives and Tales Of Terror's Romance, before ending off with Osbourne's electronic freakout take of Throbbing Gristle's Heathen Earth.

Everybody Loves Sausages then isn't anything more than a band having a blast with some golden favourites, without a care if you're on board or not.