Melvins - Chicken Switch

There is nothing you could dance to on this ‘remix’ album, not a single person with a ‘DJ’ prefix on the tracklisting. Instead, the Melvins have handed over entire albums to various electro-noise practitioners to destroy and rebuild as entirely new songs. As a result, it's difficult to tell what most of the tracks originated as, with the material consisting mostly of manipulated feedback and drones. Amid the noise there are numerous highlights such as Sunroof!’s Fennesz-alike wash of digital reverb ambience and Panacea’s Suicide-like punishing glam stomper Queen (Electroclash Remix). Every so often a riff recognizable as the Melvins appears only to drown in distortion before crashing into what sounds like Dale Crover’s drumkits playing against each other. Even Melvin fanatics may have difficulty appreciating this conceptual novelty, but Chicken Switch still serves as a fair induction into the world of the noise genre's premier antagonists. [Stephen Toman]