Mudhoney will never entirely escape its grunge past, nor should it. The band did much to define that early 1990s amalgam of punk irreverence and lo-fi fuzz metal roar. However, for the last couple of decades, this Pacific Northwest mainstay has been at least as much a psychedelic outfit as anything else. Back in 2002, Since We’ve Become Translucent kicked into gear with “Baby, Can You See the Light?” an eight-minute third-eye bender, which Mark Arm once designated as the price of entry. The message: if you weren’t willing to spin out into the stratosphere, don’t even bother showing up.
What was true for Mudhoney’s fifth album is just as relevant for its 11th. Plastic Empire, arriving in the band’s 35th year, leads with a couple of…
…swirling, howling head-melters. Sure there are funny, sarcastic punk songs with scatological punch lines and goofy puns—and one utterly sincere but still hilarious ode to Arm’s canine companion. There are screaming guitar riffs and thunderous cadences of bass and rocket launcher explosions of drumming and Arm’s querulous, wise-cracking tenor. But before you get to all this, you will have to surrender first to the cosmic transport of “Souvenir of My Trip” and “Almost Everything,” and fair warning, once you’ve dived in, you may not want to leave.
“Almost Everything” is the album’s best and most engrossing track, a rampaging, galloping, headlong jam made of sirening guitars and a battery of hand drums. It asks the big questions and, wisely, refuses to answer them. It does weird things with time, pushing it faster with an onrush of sonic sensations, but also letting it double back on itself in an ouroboros circle. “All of time is happening all at once
We’re at the core of the pulse and in constant flux,” Arm keens over the roiling mass, and damned if you can’t hear that in the music as well as the words.
Not all the songs are so abstract and cosmic. In fact, a good plurality of these cuts engage in a direct way with social and political and, particularly, environmental issues. “Cry me an atmospheric river of tears,” squalls Arm, in a bleak but funny moment. He lets no one off the hook for climate catastrophe. After taking stock of the damage, he concludes, “Take credit or the part you played/This is the world that you have shaped.”
If this sounds a little heavy, it is, but it is also blisteringly funny. “Flush the Fascists” makes its pro-democracy pitch while seated on the pot, offering quite a lot of detail about the excretory process. The album’s most humorous moments, however, come late in the disc, in a lumbering ode to miniature dogs. (“Sure they get wound up, yeah they get wound up, but they’re easy to distract, just pick ‘em up or give ‘em a tasty, tiny snack.”)
Plastic Eternity is the rare dead serious, head-trippy album that is also a lot of fun. Here’s to Mudhoney for standing on the precipice and laughing.