They used to have a sign up in the Sub Pop office that read – “What part of ‘We don’t have any money’ don’t you understand?”. But look at this, kids! [I]Packaging! [/I]Mmm, nice! And wrapped up inside you get 52 ruff-as-chuff and throbbingly fuzz-fucked tracks divided into (“best of” and “rarities and B-sides”) and from ‘In ‘N’ Out Of Grace’ through to ‘Editions Of You’ this record rocks. Like a care-in-the community case who’s sold his anti-depressants and spent the dosh onna six-pack of purple top and then gone walkabout in a McDonald’s with a large and extremely sharp kitchen knife. Groovy.
[a]Mudhoney[/a]’s genius, like that of The Ramones and the Sex Pistols, is utterly one-dimensional. What little innovation there is (like the funereal organ overlaid jazz-wankery of ‘Generation Genocide’) can be successfully missed if you blink hard enough. ‘Cos [a]Mudhoney[/a] were the last garage band. OK, so it might have been a two-car garage with electronically operated doors but its walls were smeared with loathsome mould and satanic graffiti and boasted a human-fat candle-illuminated serial-killer shrine in each rat-dung stinking corner. Far out.
‘March Of Fuzz’ is a cruddy record. It stinks. It’s a headache on shaking legs. So the next time your little sister and her annoying friends distract you from your freebase’n’vivisection experiments by playing Steps at ear-shredding volume in the room next door, spike their Sunny D with [I]Jacob’s Ladder[/I]-style experimental combat acid, Hutchence yourself to the point of spurting, stick this record on, shout her name out, stick an orange in your gob and then quickly hang yourself in the guts of her pet puppy, Frank. That’ll teach her.
“Touch me I’m sick!” sing [a]Mudhoney[/a]. And then they cleverly change it to, “Fuck me I’m thick!”. Arf! Which says it all, really.
This record is too much. Literally.