Then they flipped the formula, plunging into slow and sludgy heavy metal, dredging power from controlled pace instead of sheer speed. Melvins, ‘ Gluey Porch Treatments’ (1987)īefore releasing their debut album ‘Gluey Porch Treatments’, Melvins were one of the most ferociously fast bands in Seattle – their early demoes from 1983 are wrenched straight out of breakneck, hardcore punk. The musician infamously recorded Nirvana’s ‘Bleach’ in just 30 hours on eight-track tape at a cost of just over $600.
Guitarist Jack Endino took the album on as his first ever engineering project.įurther down the line, Skin Yard’s Endino became one of Seattle’s go-to grunge producers partly thanks to his knack for raw, unpolished recordings (plus the fact he charged relatively low fees). There’s theatrical punch to Ben McMillan’s booming vocal, and the group’s knack for a yowling guitar line. Released in 1987, their self-titled debut is both gritty and glammy. Up the proggier end of the spectrum, Skin Yard didn’t become household names, but their influence on grunge was enormous.
Kurt Cobain cited the group as a huge influence (and later covered Wipers’ songs ‘D-7’ and ‘Return of the Rat’). You can hear Wipers’ influence on everyone from Mudhoney and Melvins to Hole, Green River and most notably Nirvana. And the band’s sharp but distortion-slathered debut album ‘Is This Real?’ inspired countless future figureheads of the grunge scene. Wipers’ taut, distorted music traded in sheer brawn and ferocity for a different kind of intensity: Sage messed about in the studio for hours and hours to achieve the group’s rich, overdrive-drenched guitar sound while other punk bands focused on breakneck speed.
“See, we were even farther out in left field than the punk movement because we didn’t even wish to be classified, and that was kind of a new territory.” “We weren’t even really a punk band,” he later said in 2004.
Starting life in Portland in 1977, Wipers are sometimes regarded as the band who brought punk rock to the drizzly Pacific Northwest – though their frontman Greg Sage disagrees.