ast Thursday’s Geek Show, a tour featuring Ipecac recording artists Skeleton Key, The Melvins and Tomahawk, offered a broad range of the label’s talent with bands that rock harder, but the music stopped too soon and too early.

The Melvins played second on the bill, but clearly stole the show. They took the stage in black mumus minus the drummer, Dale Crover, who wore a black teddy. Kevin Rutmainis (bass) stood on the left and his mumu featured a large letter “F” while King Buzzo (guitar/vocals) stood to the right with a large “U” on his mumu. They drove the crowd into a frenzy in which eager audience members took joy in the violent slamming of their bodies into other people’s bodies during the fast and extremely heavy songs of The Melvins’s hour-long set, which seemed to go by in mere minutes.

“Foaming,” a song written by Rutmanis and Buzzo which is featured on the Hostile Ambient Takeover album, opened the set and they also visited “Black Stooges” and “The Brain Center at Whipples” from the same album—all quick takes for a band that is so often referred to for an almost painfully slow version of heavily distorted rock and roll.
The drums sounded explosive and up front competing with the heavily distorted bass and guitar. During the riff sections of the songs, Rutmanis would hold down the song while Buzzo added intricate details or played with different guitar effects.

	King Buzzo of The Melvins defied all preconceived notions that a grown man can't rock out in a mumu.

The RED Interview
I sat down with Kevin Rutmanis, the 44-year-old bassist for the Melvins and Tomahawk, before the show. He’s been with The Melvins since 1998, and joined the band since his old band, The Cows, toured often with The Melvins. Rutmanis is an original member of Tomahawk, a band that formed just a couple of years ago.

Though the two bands Rutmanis plays in are on the same label, the music is very different, dictating a different creative process for each group.

”The main difference is that in Tomahawk, most of the stuff is pretty worked out between Duane and Patton...generally it’s dictated to me what to play. The Melvins, Buzz writes most of the songs but it’s a little bit more open-ended as far as what I’m going to do in the songs...it’s a little looser in that sense,” he said.

The Ipecac-sponsored Geek Show tour is the first to feature The Melvins and Tomahawk on the same bill.

“It’s great, I really like it. It’s a bit of a mind fuck ’cause the way I have to approach the songs is really different playing live in the two bands. With The Melvins it’s more of a visceral physical kind of thing and with Tomahawk it’s more of a brain thing, so it’s kind of a switch, it feels strange to do one and then the other right away,” Rutmanis said, but denied that he ends up exhausted at the end of it all.

Another difference between the two bands Rutmanis alluded to is that The Melvins’s sets lists are predetermined in order to create one long cohesive-sounding song out of other songs, so they rotate very specific set lists. Tomahawk, on the other hand, switches the set list every night.

Due to the countless times I encountered references to Black Sabbath in the research for the interview, I solicited Rutmanis for his opinion on the phenomenon. He said that for most music reviews he reads regarding The Melvins,  “Inevitably the first three sentences will have something about Kurt Cobain, which is understandable, Black Sabbath and grunge. We all went through our period of listening to Black Sabbath in our lives, that’s fine, but I don’t think our music sounds anything like that. That’s just lazy writing,” he said.

The Melvins’s current project is a collaboration with California political punk innovator Jello Biafra. Rutmanis said that the first session went really well and although the two entities are not necessarily politically aligned, they get along just fine.

“He [Biafra] is really interested in thinking. He’s not just reacting. We don’t agree with everything he says, but we talk about stuff all the time...sometimes we agree, sometimes we don’t.”

The Melvins’s set flowed together from start to finish, just like one long song, as Rutmanis put it. When the set ended, the crowd pleaded for an encore—we chanted “Melvins, Melvins” while others screamed, clapped and whistled. It went on for like five minutes, but they wouldn’t give in. The crowd got excited when one of the roadies brought Rutmanis’ bass back out, but without the bassist or his bandmates behind, the crowd settled down, quite distraught.

Skeleton Key from New York is a quartet comprised of Erik Sanko on bass and vocals, Craig LeBlang on guitar and two percussionists, Matthias Bossi on the standard kit and Tim Keiper on a unique array of trash cans, metal buckets and other dull metal objects capable of creating cacophonous clatter. In fact, watching it all come together was just as entertaining as hearing the music.

Their unique brand of rock and roll sat in a balance between a heavy sound with lots of screams intersected by soft melodies and singing. Some of the stuff Keiper used for his percussive effects included these round metal things that he wound up to sound like police sirens, for one song he whipped out a hand-held electric saw to cut through some metal and he employed a giant rag doll that he swung around to knock over his cymbals, creating a crashing sound, which he repeated over and over again keeping time with the music.
All the percussion sounds could have been produced by a sampler, but they weren’t and that made it a whole lot cooler.

Tomahawk, fronted by ex-Faith No More lead singer Mike Patton, headlined the event and opened with “Birdsong” off the weeks-old album Mit Gas. The band also managed to visit “Rape This Day” and “Mayday” from the same album, along with work from the first album.
Tomahawk took the stage dressed in black Cambodian looking shirts to liken the band to the Viet Cong. The set was characterized by quick and heavy themes with slow and dark interludes that slowed the tempo down at times.

Patton’s microphone manipulation was visible in the various mics he had in front of him, one with a delay effect and one was jerryrigged to an old school gas mask which Patton fashioned to sing some verses. It wasn’t clear if the distorted vocals came as a result of an effects pedal or by Patton nearly swallowing the microphone while screaming into it.
While Patton’s bandmates, Kevin Rutmanis (bass), John Strainer (drums) and Duane Denison (guitar) produce live sounds, Patton runs the sampler to introduce ambient recorded sounds to add more layers to the music, since the band’s signature lies in the subtleties.

Each band shared equal time on stage, but the three-hour long extravaganza still seemed too short. The only question I want answered is: If The Melvins have been around the longest, why the hell don’t they headline the tour?
lou@red-mag.com