The Lucky Ones
While Nirvana broke through to the mainstream, Mudhoney were the lovable underdogs who’d actually gotten there first. This 2008 release, their eighth studio wonder, strips the band down to its raw essentials. Recorded in three and a half days with producer Tucker Martine, *The Lucky Ones* delivers a garage rock buzz that well represents the band’s roots in loose, sweaty, primitive, and excited rock anthems. Singer Mark Arm howls like a vintage ‘60s garage-rocker, aiming for notes by neighborhood not by precise address, throwing his Iggy Pop swagger into the groove. Arm relinquishes all guitar roles to Steve Turner, who overdubs some fine, twisted psychedelic guitar solos. The sound is accordingly leaner and more direct. Dan Peters’ drums connect to every riff, accenting the visceral power of basic ravers like “I’m Now,” “Inside Out Over You,” and “The Open Mind.” The title track, the album’s longest cut at nearly five minutes, even includes a short stretch where Peters’ intense percussive work is given its own platform (not exactly a drum solo, per se, but pretty close). Working quickly means Mudhoney never overthink the situation and just go for broke.
Worldwide lovers of the finer things are rejoicing at the news that Mudhoney, yep Mudhoney, is back in action in 2008 with The Lucky Ones, the band’s eighth full album in a mere 20 years of triumphant rocking. Deliberately and aggressively raw, The Lucky Ones sounds as lean and as full-on as any modern equivalent one cares to mention. Recorded in a scant 3.5 days (including overdubs) with Tucker Martine (who also recorded four songs on the previous album, Under a Billion Suns), Mudhoney went in armed with a batch of new material expecting to spend a fair amount of time getting it right. Bang—and bang again after some mixing—and a new album was birthed in record time, faster than anything else the band’s done to date. The grand majority of these numbers were intentionally written “from the rhythm up” instead of from the riff and the lyrics down. The effect is to thrust out the bottom-end rumble of drummer Dan Peters and bassist Guy Maddison, and to bring about a cohesive whole not entirely ruled by the almighty riff—although you certainly don’t have to look hard to find ‘em. Opening The Lucky Ones, the band defiantly looks twenty years of heaviness and critical hosannas in the eye and spits out the anthemic "I’m Now," an existential place where “the past makes no sense, the future looks tense.” Finding eager new converts locked firmly in the present who’ll agree should not prove difficult.
Sub Pop celebrates the seminal early Mudhoney recordings with a 2xCD set that features singles, compilation tracks, and demos, plus two fine live sets from winter 1988. Meanwhile, no envelopes are pushed on the quartet's latest, The Lucky Ones, but there's an increase in firepower that makes it their best effort in a while.
When Mark Arm yowls "The lucky ones have already gone down / The lucky ones are lucky they're not around" on the title track of Mudhoney's eighth album, it's tempting to read it as a shoutout to all those Kurt Cobains and Layne Staleys who checked out early. (Remember, this is the same self-aware band that once…
John Skibeat reviews the eight long player from perennial fuzz-rock stalwarts Mudhoney, finding them travelling a familiar, yet impressive, groove.
The Lucky Ones marks Mudhoney's twentieth anniversary as a band, and in those two decades they've evolved from the guys that first brought the Seattle sound to loser record collectors around the world into a living anachronism as the Last Grunge Band Left Alive.
I didn't check out the last Mudhoney record, 2006's Under a Billion Suns, because the one before that, 2002's Since We've Become Translucent, didn't really...