Three 65, Day 55
Melvins, Houdini

Melvins are a power trio (except when they're a four piece) from the Seattle area, consisting of Buzz Osbourne on guitar/vocals, Dale Crover on drums, and whoever is unlucky enough to be playing bass guitar with them at any given time. The reason I say "unlucky" is because Melvins (I refuse to call them "the" Melvins, I don't care what the press notes say, la la la la la) go through bass players like a pubescent boy goes through Kleenex and Vaseline.

Despite this problem with the bottom end, they're one of the best bands around. You want to talk about grunge, forget Nirvana, and fucking forget Pearl Jam - this is the real shit, right here. Slow, dirty, and heavy as fuck, Melvins have been churning shit out for over 20 years, without hiatuses or vacations to slow them down. And while some of it may be downright unlistenable - once every four or five releases, Melvins screws the pooch and releases something you just can't enjoy, just, like, a full hour of feedback or something - much of it is very, very good.

Houdini is the best of the best. From the rumbling intro of "Night Goat" to the spry pop of "Set Me Straight," this record finds the band at the height of its powers. Maybe it's because Kurt Cobain had recently introduced Melvins to a major label and helped produce, or maybe it was just their turn to be amazing. Who else could make a cover of Kiss' "Goin' Blind" into a funeral dirge, huh?

I saw Melvins open for Primus in 1993, shortly after starting college, and at the time, I had no idea who the hell they were. They scared the pants off of me with a cover of Led Zeppelin's "When The Levee Breaks" before roaring through "Hooch," the first number on Houdini. "Hooch" is nothing but nonsense words strung together by heavy percussion and turgid metal riffs. Come to think of it, that describes every Melvins song. Long may they rule!

Three 65, Day 54
Jesu, Silver EP

Jesu is a project that falls under the "Justin K. Broadrick" umbrella. For those of you out there who don't know who Broadrick is (probably many of you), here's a quick refresher course. He was a pioneering member of Napalm Death, back before grindcore even had a name, and went on to found Godflesh, one of the best industrial bands in existence. After their demise, he took on a lot of other names - Techno Animal, Ice, Final, etc. - but the one that garnered the most interest was Jesu.

Initially a combination of My Bloody Valentine-style feedback washes and crushing guitar and drums, Jesu quickly morphed into the closest thing Broadrick has ever done that's "pop." Silver was his second release, and it opened up the door to exposure in a lot more venues than Broadrick had ever enjoyed before.

The title track opens the record with lush, melodic guitars and a wave of purest feedback. Somewhere in there, Broadrick's vocals - usually grunting and drill-sergeant shouting - croon about age and death in a style that's almost palatable. "Star" is one of the best pop songs he's ever recorded, a long piece with propulsive drumming that picks up the energy level and carries it straight through to the remaining two tracks, "Wolves" and "Dead Eyes." (Someone at Pitchfork.com once said you could assemble any number of indie band names from the song titles found here. Haha, Pitchfork - one on you.)

The entire record effectively captures the mood caught on the front cover of the album: that of being lost in a large, foggy wood somewhere around dawn, deep in the winter. It's cold, it's lonely, it's aching - everything a Jesu album should be.

Three 65, Day 53
Black Sabbath, Master Of Reality

Master Of Reality was where Black Sabbath really refined its sound into a pure, elemental force. The first album, Black Sabbath, had a lot of dabbling in proto-metal and blues, and the second album, the landmark Paranoid, was a breath of fresh air. But Reality is where the band really hits the mark.

The most important thing to remember in talking about early Black Sabbath is, simply, when these albums were first released, there were no reference points. Sure, there was stuff by The Doors, and Blue Cheer, and a couple of others. But Black Sabbath was doing something no one else had even considered. Metal? What the fuck was that? Even vocalist Ozzy Osbourne, for decades the very face of heavy metal, couldn't fathom the term.

So what sounds staid to your ears is really revolutionary, considering the time period. Take the soloing halfway through "After Forever," which hasn't appeared - anywhere (except maybe on a Sabbath album) - previously. Ditto the solid riffing, which was like blues sped up to a gallop. (And people call Sabbath "slow and crushing.")

"Sweet Leaf" opens the album with a paean to pot, one of Ozzy's (many) drugs of choice. The aforementioned "After Forever" gets inside the head of a religious man, which is valiant, considering many of Black Sabbath's songs deal with the devil. "Children Of The Grave" features one of the most identifiable, beautiful riffs to ever darken a heavy metal song. One listen to that throbbing grind and you can actually hear the furious dead kids stampeding across the English countryside.

Sabbath would release other good albums - they still had three decent ones left in them at the time of this record's release, although ambition - and, to a lesser extent, keyboards - would eventually do them in. But for my money, if I'm going to listen to Sabbath, and I want the pure stuff, I turn to Master Of Reality, every time.

Three 65, Day 52
System Of A Down, Toxicity

Combining the genre-hopping fluidity of Mr. Bungle, the political angst of Rage Against The Machine, and the full-on metal attack of Slayer, System Of A Down are one of the few "nu-metal" bands that sounds like they're actually evolving the heavy metal scene.

I bought Toxicity when it first came out, and I had my reservations. I hadn't liked their first album so much; "Sugar" was a great song, but I thought the band's reach exceeded its grasp. Not so on Toxicity. Here, the band is fully in control of both its sound and its ambition.

The album starts off with the furious "Prison Song," which features the unforgettable couplet "All research and successful drug policy shows that treatment should be increased / And law enforcement decreased while abolishing mandatory minimum sentences" (try fitting that to a 4/4 beat) and rightly takes the American penal system to task.

From there, it's off to the races. The album doesn't slow down until track 6 (the excellent, bipolar "Chop Suey"), with thrashing guitars, wild drumming, and the insane vocals of Serj Tankian, whose range is almost as broad as Mike Patton's. Even the slower songs (the title track, "Aerials") that show up towards the opposite end of the record are among the finest metal recorded in this century.

Unfortunately, this would be the last good System Of A Down album, for one reason and one reason only: They let one of the guitarists sing on the follow-up. Sure, Serj Tankian sings as well, but the guitarist in question, Damon Malakian, should not be allowed near a microphone. Ever. Compared to the full throttle roar of Tankian, Malakian sounds like a whiny little brother. After a lengthy hiatus, the band has returned; please, please, PLEASE keep the whiny little prick away from the mic.

Three 65, Day 51
Misfits, Walk Among Us

File under pop-punk (really): The Misfits were never the hardcore band hardcore fans wanted them to be. One listen to their first album, Walk Among Us, is enough to prove that.

The Misfits were originally fronted by Glenn Danzig, before he was, you know, (gothic voice) "Danzig." Back when he still had a sense of humor, in other words. Taking their cues from 50s and 60s b-movies in the horror and sci-fi genres, the Misfits quickly became known for ferocious live shows and a guitar-driven attack that merged poppy harmonies with psychotic metal.

Take "I Turned Into A Martian," the album's second track. It starts off heavy, but soon enough, Danzig's doing that "whoa-whoa" thing with his voice like an Elvis impersonator. The showmanship of the King runs deep in the Misfits' DNA; all you have to do is listen to the opening seconds of the live track, "Mommy Can I Go Out & Kill Tonight," and hear Danzig say "Yuh!" before launching into the song. That's all. It's such a lip-curled tribute that the next minute, as thrashing as it is (and it is thrashing), is almost forgotten in the joke of the moment.

The Misfits released a couple of other albums, including Static Age, which were quite good. Eventually, Danzig decided to form Samhain, and then the band Danzig, and things were never quite the same. Some members reformed in the 90s (if you can count the drummer's roadie's brother's cousin's roommate a former member), and as things stand, the band is just laughable. If you're going to go out for the Misfits, insist on the originals.

Three 65, Day 50
Nirvana, In Utero

I've reached Day 50, and cannot believe I've gone 49 full days without once covering a Nirvana album. Granted, they don't have the largest discography in history - they're no Grateful Dead - but they are one of the most important bands in history.

The metalheads all love Bleach, and everyone loves Nevermind; no one but a weirdo would state that Incesticide is their favorite Nirvana record. But it takes a true punk to prefer In Utero over anything else in the band's recorded output. For me, this album - the last one the band put out, before vocalist/guitarist Kurt Cobain screwed the pooch and blew his brains out - is the epitome of Nirvana-ness, the ultimate sound the band wanted to produce.

Atonal and dissonant, intentionally abrasive, In Utero is Nirvana at their snarly best. Take a look at the first line on the album: "Teenage angst has paid off well / now I'm bored and old." Unlike other bands who only played at discomfort (namely Pearl Jam), Nirvana was genuinely shocked at their success, and a little more than off-put by it, too. So they responded to their newly found fame by putting out the rawest, angriest album possible.

In Utero has no accessible "in," other than maybe "All Apologies" (and even that ends with feedback); it's all sharp edges. And even with that intentional fuck-you posture, it still comes off as a pure pop-rock album. Take "Rape Me," for example, which caused such a consternation with big chain retailers: a song with such a violent subject comes off as a total anthem, a document of vulnerability so poignant it could only have come from Cobain.

I'll be honest. I prefer the difficult stuff to the easy stuff, any day of the week. But Nirvana sugarcoats its jagged little pills so well, it's hard to tell the difference here.

Three 65, Day 49
Big Black, Songs About Fucking

All the great, great music you love, the Nirvanas, the Tools, the Ministrys, the Nine Inch Nails... all of them have at least one of their roots traced back to Big Black. Steve Albini's band of pranksters from Illinois were the first at marrying electronics to sheer guitar angst, and some would say they were the best.

The central conceit behind Big Black is simple: thrash out on guitar, set the drum machine to maximum, sing about whatever makes the audience uncomfortable, and fuck all the rest, including production values. That Albini ever became the go-to production guy for a generation of alternanerds looking to get street cred for their debut is one of the biggest jokes in rock music. The guy turns on a microphone and leaves the room; simple as that. Fuck Pro Tools, fuck processed sounds, fuck polish: Just record it, slap a sticker on it, and sell it.

Fucking was Big Black's last album - they knew it at the time, the audience knew it at the time, and Albini was determined to go out with a bang (pun most definitely intended). "Bad Penny" is the ultimate synthesis of Black's sound, the final snarl: "I think I fucked your girlfriend last night / Then I fucked all your friends' girlfriends / Now they hate you." The song topics here are about murder, debauchery, sex and death, the ultimate pigfuck anthems for a group of Midwestern teens to disaffected to care about much of anything. It's no accident that of all the bands to cover Kraftwerk, Big Black were the only ones able to inject pure hatred and evil into it (see "The Model").

The album ends with "Bombastic Intro," thirty or so seconds of pulsing drum machine and screaming guitar. That they ended their career with an intro is an insight into Albini's modus operandi: be contrary, and confound at all costs. One can now find Albini fronting Shellac, and doing things like playing bowling alleys at 10 am on January 1st. Fuck you? No, fuck you.