For those of us who can describe our hometown as “not the rectum of the world, but you can see it from there,” the Melvins are our patron saint band. If you have any understanding of what it was like to grow up in a backwards town full of narrow minded jerks who made you feel like an idiot outcast; if you know what it was like to have nothing to do on a Friday night but hope your older sibling would pick you up some beer and weed so you and your friends could get wasted in some wooded area; and if you know what it was like to spend most of your time wishing yourself out of that dump, hoping for a greater life somewhere, anywhere else — Mangled Demos from 1983 is here for you to blast from your tiny NYC apartment and revel in what might have been described by some (who are still rotting in that hometown) as the Glory Days.

This recording is the only existing document of the original line up of the Melvins, who all met each other in high school in the tiny town of Gray’s Harbor, Washington. As this record reserves a moment to look back at their juvenile delinquent beginnings (not surprisingly inspired by the life-changing punk rock of Iggy and the Stooges and the Sex Pistols), it’s pretty hard not to think back to your own high school days and realize how far gone the adoslescent innocence of being bad actually is. Back then, smashing beer bottles off curbs and garbage dumpsters was not only acceptable, it was a welcomed form of defiance. These days, if you got arrested for something like that, you’d be an idiot.

The tight juxtaposition of bleak with hopeful tones is apparent from the first track, taken from the Elks Lodge Christmas Broadcast, a real live radio from their hometown, where the obviously older announcers say things like “I think we’re about to have our sinuses cleared out,“ or “We’ve got some high-powered gear floatin’ ‘round here… I’m getting frightened.” The Melvins then proceed to play the one-minute, sludge-heavy tune ‘If You Get Bored’.
Recorded during the birth of 1980s hardcore by two hippies in a backwoods studio in Olympia, this collection of songs features Buzz Osbourne and company kicking out jams as fast, raw and ferocious as anything else out there at the time, and while the Melvins were neither a punk nor a hardcore band, fans of both genres accepted them as their own, as the influences and attitude were one in the same.

The Melvins have always aspired to a kind of anarchic confusion, so it’s not really mind-blowing that audiences — and the musicians themselves — have been equally surprised by the band scoring major-label status and recording all those albums. With the release of Mangled Demos from 1983, complete with awkward teen pictures and a three-page foldout story of their beginnings, you’ll begin to understand how they’ve lasted this long.       Jocelyn Hoppa