Apatoff for Destruction: The Melvins mean Business

As proven by new albums from Made out of Babies, Torche, Boris, Harvey Milk and Jesu, the Melvins' influence on music just keeps growing. As proven by the recent Melvins/Big Business show at Music Hall of Williamsburg, the best place to get ear-bludgeoning, anvil-heavy avant-metal is still the original source.

The Melvins' roster now includes Big Business bassist Jared Warren and drummer Coady Willis, completing King Buzzo and Dale Crover's best lineup to date. Think the bizarro-metal equivalent of the Highwaymen. For the third straight year, the Melvins toured with Big Business opening the show, and for the the third straight year I went. Each tour has been completely different, and each show has rocked my socks off.

Big Business opened with some face-grinding tracks off their latest, Here Come the Waterworks. Their blend of Motörhead-tinged punk-metal and High on Fire's stoner thrash steamrolled out in songs like "Hands Up" and "Grounds for Divorce," with Warren's fuzz-heavy riffs and Willis' persistent drumming (clearly indebted to Crover's) verifying that two humans can sound like an army. New guitarist Toshi Kasai barely affected the band's sound, but it will be good to hear his contributions on their upcoming album, especially if some of night's unrecognized songs are on it. Big Business focused on their fastest, most Spartan music, missing some of the variety in past performances by excluding Waterworks' adventuresome second half. But they enthralled the entire house with a wham-bam show that ended before you wondered where the thank you went.

Warren and Willis returned, flanked by Buzzo and Crover, and the Melvins ripped into "Nude with Boots," the title track from their newest tour de force. The catchy, major-key workout is uncharacteristic even for a band with few defining traits, and a good example of the band's penchant for risk 25 years into their career. The payoff has been some of their very best music, from the successful Led Zeppelin bite in "The Kicking Machine" to the head-spinning "Suicide in Progress" and the magnificent "Billy Fish," all part of the Melvins' new opus and all sampled in the evening. Thankfully, Nude with Boots' equally strong predecessor had a healthy dose in the set, and the twisted, riff-oriented (A) Senile Animal tracks (including a virile one-two of "Rat-Faced Granny" and "The Hawk") had the Music Hall's crowd shouting and headbanging like arena rock kids. With a little tweaking, the latest Melvins' songs could probably make it to the Modern Rock charts, but that'd be like rewriting Napalm Death's Scum to compete with Def Leppard's Hysteria. Who'd want to?

Unlike most supergroups, the current Melvins lineup sounds more like a band than a group of musicians playing over each other. King Buzzo's Gibson had an answer for everything Warren's bass threw at it, and the two drummers played with a tightness and sync that defied their improvised-sounding constructions. Sharing vocal duties and never missing a note in the most unstable, breakneak-paced compositions, the proficient quartet raced through a deafening "Honey Bucket," plodded through perhaps the most ominous "Dies Iraea" yet recorded and inflicted the monumental "A History of Bad Men" in a seven-minute blast of awesomeness. None of it interrupted by stage banter, encore breaks or more than seconds between cacophony.

The Melvins were still throwing out curveballs near the end of their set, including an almost unrecognizable, drummers-only take on the Who's "My Generation" and a faithful, a capella and unironic rendition of Francis Scott Key's masterpiece. Closing with "Boris," the Bullhead track that a critically-adored Japanese band took their name from, the Melvins seemed to finally acknowledge the presence of all their followers. The band proceeded, as they had been doing all evening, to rock harder than all of them.