There’s an ‘8 Songs’ re-release, a ’10 Songs’ re-re-release and a bloated, vault-raping ’26 Songs’ re-re-re-release, but this is the essential one, if you ask me. These are the 6 songs that hailed the arrival of The Melvins, the real birth of grunge and the imploding (yet oddly revocable) heat-death of 80s commercial rock some 6 years later. Buzz Osbourne’s eccentric, astringent vocals and chugging, angular riffing, derived from both punk and metal but belonging to neither genre, Dale Crover’s steady, groovy drumming and the supportive basslines, this time by some fellow called Matt Lukin, are already in place. A fully-formed band trudges and tears through six songs of unconventional heaviness and occasional atonality, classic heavy rock spliced with punk and seen through a deeply warped lens.


‘Six Songs’ follows the general pattern of most early Melvins releases by interspersing brief song-interludes that are small, but perfectly formed amongst the longer tracks. Even those aren’t so long – barely more than 3 minutes long. In these concise formats, Buzz and the boys churn out riffs and changes that turned then-existing definitions of heaviness, structure and pacing on their head. It takes a little time for their approach to sink in, but once it does you’ll start discerning some great shifts and hooks in this music, and you’ll never be satisfied with that hand-wringing, cringey stuff that MTV used to market to us as grunge again.


‘Easy As It Was’ kicks in with a riff that barely deviates from the standard heavy rock textbook – and then the weird breaks and arrangements make their appearance, as do Osbourne’s vocals, as divorced from standard tough-guy menace idioms as it is possible to be, while still kicking a lot of ass. It’s odd, leftfield stuff, and yet there’s a hidden catchiness that keeps the ears glued as the music seems to both revitalize and transcend hoary tropes of riff rock at the same time. ‘Now A Limo’ is a brief, brisk song, over in a minute, all incisive rhythms and a surprising amount of dynamics under Osbourne’s bilious vocal delivery. ‘Grinding Process’ sounds like its title, with once perfectly normal riffs put through the Melvinisation process, as if the bravado of hard rock was diverted treacherously and sent to subside into a ghastly swamp. ‘#2 Pencil’ is more diverse, with frantic, punky rhythms that quickly unravel into a thick, slow verse. The band milks all the leaden groove and fuzz that they can out of the ultra-slow riffing, teetering at the edge of sonic stasis but never quite falling over. On later albums, they sometimes would, and to surprisingly good results. ‘At A Crawl’ opens with a series of slow but decidedly ominous fills by Crover, soon joined by a riff in the same vein. By now, a first-time listener should have some idea of what’s going on, and start to nod along with the plodding grooves. ‘Disinvite’ is another short and relatively fast one, with a lot of substance packed into it – basically, all the slow songs are drawn-out, and the fast ones are done in flash.


Although The Melvins emerged fully formed on this EP, they were only establishing their paradigm here – it gets sharpened and fully extrapolated, to say nothing of diversified, on future releases. This may not be the Melvins release to recommend for first-time listeners, but this is where it begins, and it’s a good beginning.


(To hear this material, you’ll probably have to get the ‘26 Songs’ edition, which redundantly repeats the original songs twice over – I really don’t know what sort of crazed minutiae-obsessed demographic record companies cater to with this sort of nonsense – and about 8 additional songs, many of which are demos. I found it easiest to just review the original 6 songs as a historical artifact rather than get into the pointless intricacies of differences between multiple versions of ‘Grinding Process’, the drunken singing on ‘Ever Since My Accident / Hugh’ and what have you.)

Year of Release: 1986 (Original release date)

Label: C/Z Records (Original release label)