I really appreciated what Big Business brought to the table on the Melvins’ last album, ‘Senile Animal’. Bassist Jared Warren did what a Melvins 4-stringer should do, and in addition he provided distinctive backing vocals that added a new dimension to the Melvins sound. Drummer Coady Willis proved equal to justifying his presence in a band that already had its own resident drum hero, Dale Crover. He played with, over, under, through and sometimes against Crover’s drums, producing an almost contrapuntal tapestry of percussion that helped in a big way to make ‘Senile Animal’ the Melvins’ heaviest album in a while. Naturally all this made me curious to see how Big Business would fare on their own, without Osbourne and Crover, on this, their second album.

Well, actually, the Melvins touch isn’t too far away, with long-time Melvins collaborator David Scott Stone providing guitars and Voyager minimoog on many of these songs. Still, it would be a mistake to slot ‘Here Come The Waterworks’ as a Melvins clone album, even if Big Business shares a lot of musical reference points with the Melvins, including of course being influenced by the Melvins themselves.

The sound is a bottom-heavy, punkish, metallic, stoner-friendly rant, the sort of thing one can’t help but feel is pretty similar to what grunge was like before it became grunge and the record companies started doling out contracts to anyone who could write a catchy chorus and reign the madness in to 3-minute long slabs of chart fodder. As a matter of fact, Big Business do have those roots, with Warren playing in the never-even-contenders North-Western band Karp through the 90s, and Willis being a veteran of several short-lived and non-commercial 90s acts from the same region.

While it’s clear that Big Business are happiest with frantic, woofer-decimating tracks like ‘Hands Up’, ‘Just As The Day Was Dawning’ or ‘Start Your Digging’, they can stretch out a bit too, as on the relatively gentler ‘Another Fourth Of July … Ruined’ which has some of the more melodic (but still pretty tortured and inaccessible) vocal stylings which Warren put to good use backing Osbourne on the Melvins album. ‘Grounds For Divorce’ is almost rollicking in a very, very detuned and bassified yet oddly rocking way. The album closes with two truly mammoth tracks. ‘I’ll Give You Something To Cry About’ is a drawn-out, mid-paced track which displays a mastery of restraint and pacing that isn’t necessarily much in evidence elsewhere. The instrumental ‘Another Beautiful Day in the Pacific Northwest’ carries on in a somnolent vibe, with delicate, almost-there, almost-melodies, probably courtesy Stone and his minimoog, weaving around a bedrock of leaden fuzz. It’s a suitably spaced-out and even majestic closer to the album.

But this isn’t really subtle music, for the most part. It’s big, loud, willfully jagged music to listen to while dangling from the razor wire as the guard dogs home in on you. It just about escapes being one-dimensional, but is definitely effective within its own parameters. If you enjoyed that last Melvins album and the killer new album from Unsane, you should enjoy giving this one a few spins.



Year of Release: 2007
Label: Hydrahead Records