Live Review: The Melvins, Warped, Mesa Cosa

Mesa Cosa should have won the support slot for The Brian Jonestown Massacre, but they didn't so they're here. And that's a good thing because watching the careening guitar freak-outs and general sense of anything-goes madness is a tremendously weird and enjoyable experience.
Warped sound like what petrol smells like and what wearing tight jeans makes you feel like. Their set sounds like a modern day blast from the past that will never get old.   
When The Melvins arrive onstage, frontman Buzz Osbourne is dressed like a psychedelic monk and drummers Dale Crover and Coady Willis resemble a fat '70s basketball player and a boy astronaut respectively. By comparison, bassist Jared Warren is dressed conservatively, but the overall visual of these four men serves its purpose. The Melvins are weird people. And they've come here tonight to play some weird music.
As soon as the band launch into Hag Me from 1993's Houdini record, it becomes apparent how such a left-of-centre band has survived for three decades. While operating in a little bubble of eccentricity, The Melvins have consistently been good enough to keep fans captivated in terms of what's going on in their strange little world. Tonight's set goes from strength to strength as it veers through the band's catalogue: there are a few of the old tracks (Your Blessened); the late '00s cuts where the band transformed into their current four-piece, two-drummer monster (Evil New War God, We Are Doomed); and the latter-day cuts that Warren and Willis didn't record with the band (weird, right?).
Throughout it all (especially during a brilliant rendition of Let It All Be), it's hard not to be enthralled by the work of band's drummers. Behind the wall of drums, the audience can only catch moments of Crover and Willis staring at one another. But in these moments it appears as though the pair are goading each other on to try something different: a fill that no one expects, a jazzy embellishment that makes the drone of Osbourne's guitar all the more pronounced or a fill that pans from left to right across the drum kit they kind-of share. Watching the pair play together is incredible; they can lock in together to thunderous effect, and then the next moment they can be off on freak-outs entirely divorced from one another. It's a thing of beauty. Weird, whacky beauty.