Eat the Spray is the latest offering from the Melvins singer and guitar player King Buzzo, aka Buzz Osborne, and Mr. Bungle’s bass player and mastermind Trevor Dunn. The four-song EP finds the pair taking a swan dive into a murky musical terrain where menace meets the avant-garde via acoustic strumming and bowing over steel strings. Together, they craft an eerie, dissonant sound that draws from the essence of sludge, punk and improv jazz, punctuated by Buzz’s barreling voice and Dunn’s intricate bass lines and ambient textures.
Eat the Spray‘s four songs are the tip of the iceberg—ideas suspended in a dream-like sea of Buzz and Dunn’s respective penchants for pushing musical boundaries, guided by a shared outlook: The weirder it gets, the better it gets.
The EP’s opening number kicks off with a tangle of slowly intertwining rhythms set to the words: “Meet me in the hallway, what’s wrong with him?/ Carry me around in a headlock, that’s all I did.”
Extracting meaning lies in the ears of the beholder.
“I have no idea what the song is about,” offers Dunn over the phone while on the road playing shows on the King Dunn Tour.
“Buzz wrote that one,” Dunn adds. “Writing lyrics is often like referring to something, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s about something. I could point to a line that refers to something that actually happened to a friend of mine, but the next line refers to something unrelated that I was thinking about recently. They just kind of fit together lyrically, and create their own narratives that can be interpreted a lot of ways.”
It’s an idea upon which Buzz elaborates slightly while pondering Eat the Spray’s title, the song’s lyrics, and the insect repellent killing a bug on the EP’s cover art. “It could be about anything,” Buzz says. “Maybe ‘Eat the Spray’ is about standing on the beach and staring at the ocean. It’s whatever you want it to be about.”
Buzz and Dunn started playing music together circa 1998 as part of the alt-metal supergroup Fantômas, with Faith No More vocalist Mike Patton and former Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo. Fantômas isn’t active anymore, but Buzz and Dunn have remained friends, and over the years Melvins and Mr. Bungle have played occasional shows together. As Dunn recalls, one night in Los Angeles, Buzz came to an improv jazz gig where Dunn was playing in a trio with guitarist Nels Cline (Wilco) and a drummer. Dunn was switching between playing an electric and an upright bass all night.
“Buzz saw that and a light bulb went off,” Dunn recalls. “He thought, ‘What if I did a Melvins album with an upright bass? He saw how weird it could get, and that appealed to him.”
The result of their first pairing, along with drummer Dale Crover, is the 2012 Melvins Lite album, Freak Puke. Dunn’s bass fleshes out an almost modern classical dimension in Melvins’ blend of sludge and punk inflections. Songs like “Mr. Rip-Off,” “Worm Farm Waltz” and “Tommy Goes Berserk” also show off a more experimental side of Melvins’ sound that is as raw as it is refined, and ultimately satisfying.
This thread is brought to a finer point in Buzzo and Dunn’s 2020 LP, Gift of Sacrifice, and most recently with Eat the Spray. Their slow and spacious blend of acoustic sludge-punk and jazz influences finds new depth in “Housing, Luxury, Energy,” “Junkie Jesus” and “Science In Modern America.” Together, they move beyond the full-bore sonic onslaught of distortion and wild rhythms that one gets from a Melvins or Mr. Bungle record, and there are no drums.
These shows mark the first time that Osborne has taken songs from Gift Of Sacrifice on the road, as the initial tour was derailed by the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s also the first time the two have toured together as a duo.
They’re also playing numbers from Buzzo’s 2014 solo album, This Machine Kills Artists, and a reportedly massive rendition of the Melvins “Roman Bird Dog” from 1992’s Lysol LP.
Years have passed since many of these songs were written and recorded. As Buzz explains, some of them have changed completely.
“I’m not too precious when it comes to that kind of stuff, even with the Melvins,” Buzzo says. “If we hear something that we don’t like or want to do it differently, we’ll just change it. The records, to me, are just kind of suggestions about how it could sound at that point, and after playing them live, sometimes they get better.”
For these shows, Buzz is playing guitar, Trevor is bowing and picking a stand-up bass, and both are singing. Naturally, each song takes on a life of its own in a balance of musical instincts, structure, improvisation and on-stage chemistry. “Trevor and I have never done an acoustic thing quite like this,” Buzz says. “He is a fantastic player, and what you do with someone like that is you let him play his instruments. I don’t dictate a thing to him.”
Together, things get weirder and better every step of the way.
WHO: King Buzzo and Trevor Dunn, JD Pinkus, Void Maines
WHEN: Thursday, Sept. 12, 7 p.m. (doors), 8 p.m. (show)
WHERE: 40 Watt Club
HOW MUCH: $25 (adv.), $30
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