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2 hours ago, Dead1 said:

I wouldn't agree grunge scene was initially metal adjacent despite some of its bands clearly being or evolving into metal (Soundgarden and AIC).

...and then we can have a related debate about what "heavy" means. I'd go out on a limb and say that Smells Like Teen Spirit is a "heavy" song, having been caught in a mosh at university when some cover band was playing it.

But I guess people jump up and down to hard house music too. 

Those early grunge guys didn't look down on the music so much as the perceived heavy metal image. The homoerotic leather and studs look or, at the extreme end, lipstick and puffy hair. I still scratch my head as to how Motley Crue and Poison became a thing.  

But, I do remember getting flak from my house mate in my first flat in 1992 for wearing an Ozzy Osbourne t-shirt and being a heavy metal fan. Because he was a DJ on the student radio station that was 100% "alternative" music during the day (except it did have specialty shows - a metal show where I first heard Sabbat and Fear Factory). This was the most popular song in town when I started university:

 

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Metalheads were non existent at Uni in the courses I did and other than myself I never saw a band shirt at either Hobart or Launceston campus.  This was early 2000s.

Music scene as well as political and cultural scenes were dead as a whole.

Only events people bothered with were cheap beer nights held by Engineering Society in Hobart.

 

Even academic life was pretty shit eg I was only undergraduate member of history society.

 

I find Australians to be anti-intellectual.  Even university was viewed as just something you had to do to get a "ticket" (degree).

 

This follows on in later life.  Australian media lacks sophistication or insight and even university educated Australians are either not interested or not capable of intellectual discourse unlike North Americans and Europeans.

 

Basically Australia lacks the intellectual and philosophical tradition found in other countries.

 

 

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7 hours ago, JonoBlade said:

...and then we can have a related debate about what "heavy" means. I'd go out on a limb and say that Smells Like Teen Spirit is a "heavy" song, having been caught in a mosh at university when some cover band was playing it.

But I guess people jump up and down to hard house music too. 

Those early grunge guys didn't look down on the music so much as the perceived heavy metal image. The homoerotic leather and studs look or, at the extreme end, lipstick and puffy hair. I still scratch my head as to how Motley Crue and Poison became a thing.  

But, I do remember getting flak from my house mate in my first flat in 1992 for wearing an Ozzy Osbourne t-shirt and being a heavy metal fan. Because he was a DJ on the student radio station that was 100% "alternative" music during the day (except it did have specialty shows - a metal show where I first heard Sabbat and Fear Factory). This was the most popular song in town when I started university:

Yes, Teen Spirit is a heavy song and grunge is metal adjacent. I believe Deadly's point is that grunge was essentially just rebranded punk, but I have to ask isn't punk itself already metal adjacent? It is for me.

I'm sure there are plenty of metalheads who dislike and avoid punk at all costs but there have to be just as many who like and embrace it. Silly argument as thrash metal (which was still a thing in the early grunge era) is the marriage of punk and nwobhm and Sabbath while grunge is the marriage of punk and 70's rock. Punk factors heavily into both, so I'd say that makes punk and grunge metal adjacent. I'm sure there are some dumbass metalheads out there who claim they hate punk, who also have no idea that punk is already baked into the shit they're listening to.

He was right to give you shit for wearing an Ozzy shirt in 1992 🤡

You don't know how Crue and Poison as dudes with their makeup, high heels, spandex & hairspray became a thing (simple, chicks thought it was great) but I don't know how this corspepaint thing has become so prevalent in black metal. I look at some of these bands' photos and I just facepalm half the time. I love the music obviously, but quite often I find the image to be downright cringey. Fortunately I can easily separate the two since most of these bands don't play too many live shows around these parts anyway, and it's not like the 80's when MTV kept all these images in our faces constantly.

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38 minutes ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

I'm sure there are plenty of metalheads who dislike and avoid punk at all costs but there have to be just as many who like and embrace it. Silly argument as thrash metal (which was still a thing in the early grunge era) is the marriage of punk and nwobhm and Sabbath while grunge is the marriage of punk and 70's rock. Punk factors heavily into both, so I'd say that makes punk and grunge metal adjacent. I'm sure there are some dumbass metalheads out there who claim they hate punk, who also have no idea that punk is already baked into the shit they're listening to.

Punk is like milk for me. Lots of wonderful things made from it, great as an ingredient in all sorts of stuff, hard to overstate its importance, but I've never liked it by itself. 

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5 hours ago, RelentlessOblivion said:

Funny I copped it at uni when someone overheard my ringtone because apparently real music fans don’t listen to metal…

Weirdly enough I either saw or bumped into more than a couple of metal fans at school over the last couple of years. People who'd either say what's up because they knew the bands on my shirt, or people who were wearing their own tee's. Was actually surprised to see any 18 - 20 somethings into metal, let alone the amount I did

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7 minutes ago, FatherAlabaster said:

Punk is like milk for me. Lots of wonderful things made from it, great as an ingredient in all sorts of stuff, hard to overstate its importance, but I've never liked it by itself. 

 

But at least you understand that the punk is in there. You'd be surprised how many people don't.

You don't like milk? Was just a couple of years ago I stopped drinking milk with most of my meals. Now I'll generally crack a beer with my meal. Or water. Unless it's breakfast with eggs n shit then it'd be coffee. But I don't eat breakfast (unless I make breakfast for dinner) so I usually have my coffee by itself. Well not technically by itself, I do add a teaspoon of sugar and half & half. Sometimes I'll cheat and have a blueberry muffin with my coffee. And then I'll feel guilty for the rest of the day. Which reminds me it's 1:30pm, I think it's probably late enough for a coffee. (and I bought some blueberry muffins yesterday) Do you think punks like coffee? You think they put milk in it? What were we talking about again?

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7 hours ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

Yes, Teen Spirit is a heavy song and grunge is metal adjacent. I believe Deadly's point is that grunge was essentially just rebranded punk, but I have to ask isn't punk itself already metal adjacent? It is for me.

I'm sure there are plenty of metalheads who dislike and avoid punk at all costs but there have to be just as many who like and embrace it. Silly argument as thrash metal (which was still a thing in the early grunge era) is the marriage of punk and nwobhm and Sabbath while grunge is the marriage of punk and 70's rock. Punk factors heavily into both, so I'd say that makes punk and grunge metal adjacent. I'm sure there are some dumbass metalheads out there who claim they hate punk, who also have no idea that punk is already baked into the shit they're listening to.

I do think grunge is stylistically metal adjacent.  Like you said it came from punk but added a butt ton of 1970s rock/metal.  I was more referring to the scene from a cultural perspective.

 

Totally agree many metalheads don't understand how much punk goes into metal and vice versa.

6 hours ago, FatherAlabaster said:

Punk is like milk for me. Lots of wonderful things made from it, great as an ingredient in all sorts of stuff, hard to overstate its importance, but I've never liked it by itself. 

I agree to some degree.  A lot of punk an hardcore is pretty meh.  Generally metal bands do it better.  I think the punks understood this themselves - in Ian Glasper's book on UK thrash metal ("Contract in Blood") a number of UK hardcore guys talked about how they switched to thrash metal simply because thrash metal was not only getting more intense than hardcore but also allowed greater creative freedom* than punk/hardcore.   Plus they liked the fact metal fans were more into music that brawling and policing the scene than hardcore and punk.

The other obvious example is Napalm Death who start off punk/hardcore but then start adding more metal into it because it enabled them a far broader pallet (eg Scum has a lot of slower Celtic Frost moments which is deliberate).

But sometimes punks really out do themselves - eg Sex Pistols or Dead Kennedies or Discharge or Mighty Mighty Bosstones.

 

*Now that's the UK scene in the early-mid 1980s.  Punk ended up going lot of different ways in late 1980s and 1990s - ska, grunge, folk, pop, emo etc.  Note most of those genres tone down the intensity and extremity.  But in terms of intensity and brutality, metal offered a lot more scope than pure hardcore.  

 

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I wish I'd never used the term "metal adjacent." It doesn't even really mean anything. It could be interpreted as "metal parallel" which means it runs alongside and never overlaps with metal.

Like U2 and Dire Straits are metal parallel. Rock bands rooted in blues but don't use the metal elements that started to diverge in the early 70s.

I thought punk was an attitude?

Someone has probably done a Venn diagram that shows overlapping musical styles and with bands as data points within the wider circles.

16 hours ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

You don't know how Crue and Poison as dudes with their makeup, high heels, spandex & hairspray became a thing (simple, chicks thought it was great) but I don't know how this corspepaint thing has become so prevalent in black metal. I look at some of these bands' photos and I just facepalm half the time. I love the music obviously, but quite often I find the image to be downright cringey. Fortunately I can easily separate the two since most of these bands don't play too many live shows around these parts anyway, and it's not like the 80's when MTV kept all these images in our faces constantly.

Ok, I don't know why chicks thought that was great then. And was most of Crue's and Poison's audience women? I doubt it. It must have been invented purely for shock value or because they reaaaally wanted to wear high heels and make up. Not judging. In fact I think it's clever if an artist can get their preferences mainstreamed. Like Rob Halford importing a homoerotic wardrobe into metal. Genius.

What do studs do anyway? I mean, as a fashion accessory, other than being useful in a fight.

With corpepaint I guess they just wanted to dress up like Kiss. But, agree it doesn't have to distract from enjoyment of the music. Although, I can't actually remember the last time I saw a band live that was wearing corpsepaint. I noticed there was a black metal band playing locally soon, but because I didn't know them and they were wearing corpsepaint in the poster, that was an easy pass.

 

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On 8/1/2022 at 6:25 PM, Dead1 said:

From what I understand grunge emerged from Seattle's punk/hardcore scene

It was a mixed bag. You also had the rock side like Mother Love Bone, Green River, Screaming Tree's and everybody's favorites Pearl Jam as well as the metal side with Melvins, Tad, the aforementioned Soundgarden, etc. Kurt Cobain was famously a huge fan of and specifically influenced by the Beatles.

These bands were all doing their thing before grunge 'emerged'. It's not like at some point in 1991 all of these bands and disparate influences coalesced into 'grunge'. That was of course a commercial/pop culture term invented and applied from the outside. I am sure to a person anyone from any of those bands would say the same cliche' "we never thought of ourselves as a grunge band".

All that is to say that some bands came from punk and hardcore, some from metal, some from rock or fuzz. It was Nirvana, specifically the MTV video for Smells Like Teen Spirit, that initially defined grunge for everyone who was not actually part of the band scene.

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Exactly Hungaroonius. Like most terms people apply to a group of bands "grunge" was a marketing term the record companies picked up from the music media and used to sell records. People started using it as if it were a sub-genre or a style of rock music but it's really not, it's just a term for that early 90's Seattle scene. The bands involved represented various different sub-genres from punk to rock to hard rock to (arguably) metal and I'm sure none of them ever gave a single fuck about being "grunge."

So to have a grunge revival would be impossible, unless you have a time machine and could make your way back to the early 90's in Seattle. How STP from Huntington Beach (Orange County) and San Diego CA got caught up in all this grunge shit I'll never know. I guess the Melvins don't get included because they weren't as commercially accessible as some of those other bands and they formed in 1983 well before anyone was smelling like Teen Spirit. But then Idk because Soundgarden formed a year later in '84 and their early stuff was not extremely accessible either and they still got lumped in. I suppose someone thought dudes like Cobain and Cornell and Staley simply had more potential to be 'rock stars' and make some people rich than Buzzo.

 

Mad Season - I Don't Know Anything, Live at the Moore, Seattle, April 29 1995, Layne was 27 here.

 

Melvins Live March 4th 1994 Essen, Germany full set

 

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22 minutes ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

dudes like Cobain and Cornell and Staley simply had more potential to be 'rock stars' and make some people rich than Buzzo.

Exactly! And since we mentioned it over in another post the chick appeal is not a small factor, and if you were a teen or college girl in 91'-94' those guys, plus Eddie Vedder were your sex idols, unless you were into boy bands I guess.

Not King Buzzo though haha, but he is no doubt the baddest of the bunch. One of the few times I was literally star-struck was seeing him outside a small club at a show. Big hair and the whole bit. He is also famously an unabashed Kiss army regular, so add that into the grunge formula I guess!

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4 minutes ago, Hungarino said:

Exactly! And since we mentioned it over in another post the chick appeal is not a small factor, and if you were a teen or college girl in 91'-94' those guys, plus Eddie Vedder were your sex idols, unless you were into boy bands I guess.

Not King Buzzo though haha, but he is no doubt the baddest of the bunch. One of the few times I was literally star-struck was seeing him outside a small club at a show. Big hair and the whole bit. He is also famously an unabashed Kiss army regular, so add that into the grunge formula I guess!

 

I used to post with a dude who went by 'Doctor Metal'. He's a surfer lives in Ocean Beach San Diego (or he did, I haven't heard from him in several years) and he claims he ran into the Melvins early one morning and bought the band breakfast in some local greasy spoon. I forget the circumstances now but he said they had played a gig somewhere locally the night before or something and knowing him he was likely on his way to the beach to catch some waves. He made it sound like they were hungry and couldn't scrape up the money for breakfast. But Doc told a lot of pretty wild stories though so there's really no telling how much of his bullshit was actually true.

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I wouldn't say Melvins are grunge despite being a massive influence on it (kind of like Sex Pistols had a massive influence on 1980s NWOBHM and thrash but these scenes didn't really sound like Sex Pistols).  

The grunge/Seattle aesthetic was far more subdued and introverted as well as time more bluesy.  Even the metal/1970s hard rock bands ala AIC or Soundgarden had this,  Melvins on other hand are pure bombast and also too experimental (Seattle grunge was actually pretty conventional - some of it due to many of them being on Subpop who wanted the bands to sound the way they did).  

Melvins really did stick out like sore thumbs in 1980s .  The scene caught up with them them in 1990s with bands like Primus, Kyuss, Rollins Band, Helmet, Life of Agony, Prong, Faith No More etc and that whole alternative metal scene all very much going down some the squirrel holes dug by Melvins.

As I mentioned  guys in bands like Green River, Mother Love Bone etc came from punk/hardcore though I will admit other guys had a more conventional 1970s rock "upbringing."

 

The biggest grunge band of them all, Nirvana, clearly had strong punk leanings early on even if they did go for an almost nursery rhyme approach to it. 

The funny thing about the Seattle scene's sound was that it's metal influences were Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin etc and they kind of pretended the whole 1980s metal scene (including thrash, death, crossover and grind) didn't exist.

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21 minutes ago, Dead1 said:

I wouldn't say Melvins sound or vibe has anything to do with the Seattle scene.   Bits of doom metal, thrash, hardcore, avant garde rock ala Primus, alternative rock and even California style punk, but certainly no Seattle/Grunge aesthetics.

The grunge aesthetic was far more subdued and introverted as well as time more bluesy.  Even the metal/1970s hard rock bands ala AIC or Soundgarden had this,  Melvins on other hand are pure bombast.  

Melvins really did stickout like sore thumbs in 1980s .  The scene caught up with them them in 1990s with bands like Primus, Kyuss, Rollins Band, Helmet, Life of Agony, Prong etc and that whole alternative metal scene all very much going down some the squirrel holes dug by Melvins.

As I mentioned  guys in bands like Green River, Mother Love Bone etc came from punk/hardcore though I will admit other guys had a more conventional 1970s rock "upbringing."

 

The biggest grunge band of them all, Nirvana, clearly had strong punk leanings early on even if they did go for an almost nursery rhyme approach to it.  Insesticide still gets cranked a lot in my house!

https://www.westword.com/music/melvins-king-buzzo-is-a-king-of-grunge-13827624

 

"The grunge aesthetic" as you see it. And that's valid for you. But in a scene where just about every band sounded a bit different from the others, I'm sure lots of people have their own personal ideas about what "the grunge aesthetic" was, which surely differ greatly depending on which particular bands they happened to be into. And with the only common denominators linking all those "grunge" bands being a specific period of time and a specific location, I don't see how you could possibly exclude the Melvins who qualify on both counts. 

They were playing around Seattle at the same time as a lot of these other grunge bands or proto grunge bands in the late 80's into the 90's, and they are most definitely widely recognized as being influential in the formation of the Seattle grunge scene. They were certainly grungy enough looking (especially in the 80's) and they played some type of non commercial hard rock music with punk and blues and metal influences. You listed all the various little things that you can hear in their sound, which aside from thrash (which I don't personally hear any of in Mevins music anyway) are all things that can all be found in various other Seattle grunge bands. So I mean no, obviously the Melvins are not the exact same thing as any of the 'big 4': Alice or Soundgarden or Nirvana or PJ, but that doesn't mean they weren't a big part of that 80's Seattle scene that spawned all those bands.

https://loudwire.com/bands-pioneered-grunge/

You might or might not be aware that there is even one school of thought who believes by the time those 'big 4' hit it big and became well known all over the world with their videos in hyper rotation on MTV in the early 90's, the true grunge scene had already died and all that was left was some commercial mainstream rock bullshit which was little more than a pale shadow of the original vibrant and eclectic scene trying to cash in. I'm not saying that I necessarily subscribe to that view 100%, but I think that's certainly a reasonable take on the whole grunge thing.

And as I've said before, if there's any one band that doesn't qualify as "grunge" to me it would be Alice in Chains, not the Melvins. And believe me I've loved AiC from the very first time I ever heard them. But they're not in any way a "grunge" band as far as I'm concerned. Nor was STP for that matter, that's utterly ridiculous. 

 

TAD - God's Balls

 

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...while I agree with part of Dead1's post...he missed the boat on a couple things....mainly that MELVINS were somewhat of an anomaly in the 80's...for me they were part of the noise school along with bands like BIG BLACK, TAR, SCRATCH ACID, BLIND IDIOT GOD, JESUS LIZARD, early pre sell out WHITE ZOMBIE, COWS, BAND OF SUSANS, SWANS, BIG BOYS, SONIC YOUTH and the rest of the post NoWave movement...just to name a few....

...secondly...MOTHER LOVE BONE.....ugh...poseur band ...fame hungry and had more in common with ENUFF ZNUFF and LIZZY BORDEN than THE MONO MEN or U-MEN....

 

...and WhiteNoise...I'm with you on ALICE IN CHAINS...I don't know what they were, I just liked them a lot and still do....

...lastly...I'm glad someone mentioned just how unbelievably influential SEX PISTOLS were on practically all new music that came after them...especially extreme music and postpunk....which could arguably the root of post-1980 music in general....

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11 minutes ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

 

https://www.westword.com/music/melvins-king-buzzo-is-a-king-of-grunge-13827624

 

"The grunge aesthetic" as you see it. And that's valid for you. But in a scene where just about every band sounded a bit different from the others, I'm sure lots of people have their own personal ideas about what "the grunge aesthetic" was, which surely differ greatly depending on which particular bands they happened to be into. And with the only common denominators linking all those "grunge" bands being a specific period of time and a specific location, I don't see how you could possibly exclude the Melvins who qualify on both counts. 

They were playing around Seattle at the same time as a lot of these other grunge bands or proto grunge bands in the late 80's into the 90's, and they are most definitely widely recognized as being influential in the formation of the Seattle grunge scene. They were certainly grungy enough looking (especially in the 80's) and they played some type of non commercial hard rock music with punk and blues and metal influences. You listed all the various little things that you can hear in their sound, which aside from thrash (which I don't personally hear any of in Mevins music anyway) are all things that can all be found in various other Seattle grunge bands. So I mean no, obviously the Melvins are not the exact same thing as any of the 'big 4': Alice or Soundgarden or Nirvana or PJ, but that doesn't mean they weren't a big part of that 80's Seattle scene that spawned all those bands.

https://loudwire.com/bands-pioneered-grunge/

You might or might not be aware that there is even one school of thought who believes by the time those 'big 4' hit it big and became well known all over the world with their videos in hyper rotation on MTV in the early 90's, the true grunge scene had already died and all that was left was some commercial mainstream rock bullshit which was little more than a pale shadow of the original vibrant and eclectic scene trying to cash in. I'm not saying that I necessarily subscribe to that view 100%, but I think that's certainly a reasonable take on the whole grunge thing.

And as I've said before, if there's any one band that doesn't qualify as "grunge" to me it would be Alice in Chains, not the Melvins. And believe me I've loved AiC from the very first time I ever heard them. But they're not in any way a "grunge" band as far as I'm concerned. Nor was STP for that matter, that's utterly ridiculous. 

 

TAD - God's Balls

 

 

 

I did change my reply to note that Melvins did have a huge impact on grunge in terms of the sludginess.   But Melvins were too bombastic and almost jokey, whereas the whole grunge scene was more introverted and depressed.

After all Sex Pistols had a massive influence on NWOBHM and thrash but Sex Pistols have a totally different vibe to those scenes.

 

I like the idea of grunge being on the way out when it became popular.  Same thing happened to melodic DM. By the time the scene started to make waves in key English speaking markets with bands like In Flames, Soilwork and Dark Tranquility (1999-2000), it was already long past its create peak (1995-1997).

 

As for Alice in Chains, to me they are very much a grunge band IMO - introverted, depressive, sludgy, bluesy (as in early 1970s ala Led Zeppelin).  They use metal but sound and vibe wise they don't fit into metal scene at all, even today.  They do sit perfectly well alongside other grunge luminaries. 

 And like you I've been a fan of them for 3 decades now!  

Stone Temple Pilots might not have been a Seattle band but I do think they managed to tap into the Seattle vibe very well.  Core is more grunge than most Seattle bands!

When you think about Nirvana also sticks out - they always had a raw and abrasive element unlike Mudhoney, Pearl Jam, STP, AIC or later Soundgarden all of whom always sounded quite refined in comparison.

----

Regardless I think that Seattle scene was pretty incredible.  An isolated minor "secondary city" spawned a very interesting music scene that had major ramifications world wide.

And I love the fact that the influences and development is somewhat a mystery or shrouded in complexity.  I mean you read about development of grindcore, death and thrash and it's pretty straight forward.  Grunge on the other hand is convoluted as hell.

 

Never heard that Tad album,  I will check it out.  Thanks!

9 minutes ago, MarkhantonioYeatts said:

...while I agree with part of Dead1's post...he missed the boat on a couple things....mainly that MELVINS were somewhat of an anomaly in the 80's...for me they were part of the noise school along with bands like BIG BLACK, TAR, SCRATCH ACID, BLIND IDIOT GOD, JESUS LIZARD, early pre sell out WHITE ZOMBIE, COWS, BAND OF SUSANS, SWANS, BIG BOYS, SONIC YOUTH and the rest of the post NoWave movement...just to name a few....

 

...lastly...I'm glad someone mentioned just how unbelievably influential SEX PISTOLS were on practically all new music that came after them...especially extreme music and postpunk....which could arguably the root of post-1980 music in general....

I don't know much about that no wave even though I know a few of those bands (White Zombie obviously but also Jesus Lizard, Swans and Sonic Youth).  I assume Dinosaur Jr also fits in as well - again kind of noise rock with some metal and punk influences. 

 

Incidentally J Mascis was originally in hardcore band Deep Wound who apparently influenced some future American grindcore acts.

 

(Got to see Dinosaur Jr live over a decade ago as my wife is fan. Great gig)!

I can see how those bands fit into influencing grunge scene.

 

As for Sex Pistols, IMO they are probably the most influential rock band of the 1970s along with Black Sabbath.

 

 

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I'm not sure how I feel about grunge really. I liked a lot of the bands but it also gets mixed in with my feelings about alternative rock/metal. And the music is now quite dated. I'll still throw on Dirt or Facelift or Superunknown or  Badmotorfinger but I'm also sort of over those albums at this point except BMF which is one of my favorite albums of all time. Melvins are a different animal to me, but I fucking love Melvins. Peal Jam is boring and flat out suck-they're like the Bruce Springsteen of grunge . I never got into Nirvana in a big way. Actually, it was Nevermind. That album blew up in such a big way that I refused to buy it. But I did get In Utero which I rather liked and yeah, of course they were pivotal.  I think Nirvana was a bigger influence on guys that were younger. I was in my my mid-late 20's rather than, say high school.  I also mash up bands like NIN and Ministry that produced influential albums around the same time or maybe a couple of years later but it all blends into the amorphous early 90's alt metal thing along with way too much airplay from bands like The Smashing Pumpkins and The Offspring. 

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37 minutes ago, Dead1 said:

 

 

I did change my reply to note that Melvins did have a huge impact on grunge in terms of the sludginess.   But Melvins were too bombastic and almost jokey, whereas the whole grunge scene was more introverted and depressed.

After all Sex Pistols had a massive influence on NWOBHM and thrash but Sex Pistols have a totally different vibe to those scenes.

 

I like the idea of grunge being on the way out when it became popular.  Same thing happened to melodic DM. By the time the scene started to make waves in key English speaking markets with bands like In Flames, Soilwork and Dark Tranquility (1999-2000), it was already long past its create peak (1995-1997).

 

As for Alice in Chains, to me they are very much a grunge band IMO - introverted, depressive, sludgy, bluesy (as in early 1970s ala Led Zeppelin).  They use metal but sound and vibe wise they don't fit into metal scene at all, even today.  They do sit perfectly well alongside other grunge luminaries. 

 And like you I've been a fan of them for 3 decades now!  

Stone Temple Pilots might not have been a Seattle band but I do think they managed to tap into the Seattle vibe very well.  Core is more grunge than most Seattle bands!

When you think about Nirvana also sticks out - they always had a raw and abrasive element unlike Mudhoney, Pearl Jam, STP, AIC or later Soundgarden all of whom always sounded quite refined in comparison.

----

Regardless I think that Seattle scene was pretty incredible.  An isolated minor "secondary city" spawned a very interesting music scene that had major ramifications world wide.

And I love the fact that the influences and development is somewhat a mystery or shrouded in complexity.  I mean you read about development of grindcore, death and thrash and it's pretty straight forward.  Grunge on the other hand is convoluted as hell.

 

Never heard that Tad album,  I will check it out.  Thanks!

I don't know much about that no wave even though I know a few of those bands (White Zombie obviously but also Jesus Lizard, Swans and Sonic Youth).  I assume Dinosaur Jr also fits in as well - again kind of noise rock with some metal and punk influences. 

 

Incidentally J Mascis was originally in hardcore band Deep Wound who apparently influenced some future American grindcore acts.

 

(Got to see Dinosaur Jr live over a decade ago as my wife is fan. Great gig)!

I can see how those bands fit into influencing grunge scene.

 

As for Sex Pistols, IMO they are probably the most influential rock band of the 1970s along with Black Sabbath.

 

 

 

Only thing I'm gonna disagree with there (besides the AiC thing we've already been over) is Mudhoney sounding "quite refined." Now granted I only have the Superfuzz Bigmuff comp so that's mainly what I'm going by, and while I think that record is a really cool punk record, it's far from what I'd call refined.

Of course now looking up their discography I'm a bit surprised to learn they've put out 10 more albums since then and I haven't heard any of them except the aforementioned SFBM '88 and the self titled from '89 so it's quite possible they could have refined their sound since then.

 

Mudhoney - Superfuzz Bigmuff plus Early Singles, comp came out 1990 but Superfuzz came out in '88.

 

Mudhoney - Suck You Dry 1992

 

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