Melvins: Dale Crover

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Released alongside King Buzzo and Joe Preston in 1992, Dale Crover forms the second part of one of the funniest concepts in the Melvins catalogue. The three members each received their own “solo” EP, with the artwork deliberately parodying the four individual KISS solo albums released in 1978. Crover’s sleeve naturally takes its visual cues from Peter Criss.

The joke might have supplied the packaging, but the music isn’t throwaway. Crover handles lead and backing vocals, guitars and drums, with Debbi Shane contributing bass and backing vocals. It provides a rare opportunity to hear just how much of the Melvins’ musical personality existed beyond Crover’s famously enormous drum sound.

Across four tracks and barely thirteen minutes, Crover moves through crooked punk, sludge, noise and the sort of deliberately awkward heavy rock that made the early-’90s Melvins so influential. There’s plenty of weight here, but also a strange melodic instinct lurking beneath the distortion. It feels related to the Melvins without simply sounding like Buzz Osborne songs with somebody else singing them.

“Hex Me” is a wonderfully abrupt opening statement before “Dead Wipe” pushes deeper into warped heavy rock. The second side gives the material more room to breathe, with “Respite” and “Hurter” stretching past four minutes apiece. All four compositions were written by Crover.

Taken together with King Buzzo and Joe Preston, this is one of those wonderfully odd corners of the Melvins catalogue that makes collecting the band so much fun. But Dale Crover stands perfectly well on its own: short, heavy, eccentric and unmistakably part of the strange universe the Melvins were building immediately before Houdini introduced them to a much larger audience.

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