As much as I truly enjoy Gluey Porch Treatments, this will be my only Melvins song on the list, so I'd better make it a good one.
"Honey Bucket" is a spleen shot. It is a successful spleen shot, destroying the spleen. You thank it for taking the trouble to liquify your spleen.
The opening instrumental of this song is what the Melvins typically were: Arrogantly savage, rhymically insane, ugly as sin, no regard for coherence other than the goal of rather surgically undoing the very source code of musicality. Other less "poppy" Melvins songs take this "anti-music" idea to absurd lengths (emphasis on length). This is a "poppy" song. Then the song jump cuts into a new scene, abruptly finding a four-beat time signature. Just the most divine down-chopped guitar part, such a crunch. The vocal barks into action. It is a pop song, see, complete with "choruses" of sludgy doom-hammer drum solos. It ends in three minutes sharp.
There are no lyrics. The Melvins are my heroes for rarely writing lyrics, simply inventing the guttural sounds necessary for selling the idea of what lyrics might be appropriate, should they exist. This is at once so meta and workmanly pragmatic. What ideas would you expect this song to contain anyway? The meaning is literally in the utterance. Buzz Osborne is the guitarist and vocalist. As a youth playing music in his hometown of Aberdeen, Washington, he took in a wannabe kid named Kurt Cobain, let him watch the already competent Melvins rehearse, and showed him that a musical life will sustain you in whatever state you and the music are in.
The drumming is of a kind of angelic brutality that takes your breath away with blunt force. I think they technically make no sound, detuned as low as they are. They are to music as infrared waves are to the light spectrum. Their sophistication, especially the opening movement, is belied by the desecration they are committing. Without the drumming, there is no "Honey Bucket." This song, in a way, is Dale Crover's "Moby Dick."
I had the pleasure of meeting the Melvins after a show in Minneapolis many years ago. They were standing outside, next to the white minivan they were touring in. I approached Dale Crover...
I will never get to meet John Bonham, Dave Grohl, Mitch Mitchell, Matt Cameron, or Keith Moon. This was the one drummer in the pantheon of true legends I had standing before me, captive to my most grandiose etudes.
I told him: "You drum good."
He smiled and bowed, giving me a twirly, courtly salute.
We talked about road travel for a while. They were all very personable, modest guys. Small town guys.