Mudhoney are the last band standing from the great grunge boom of the 1990s, and they showed exactly why in a scorching set at Double Whammy Sunday night.
A sold-out crowd packed the club to watch the Seattle legends tear through 90 minutes of crunchy grunge classics, singer Mark Arm bellowing in his distinctive jagged way and washes of garage-punk riffs crashing around the room.
Mudhoney are the survivors, pounding away ever since 1988 with mostly original members, and created from the remains of the grunge pioneers Green River. They’ve mostly avoided the tragedies that haunt so much of that gone generation of grunge – Nirvana, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, Screaming Trees. They didn’t turn into stadium journeymen like Pearl Jam but kept their heads down and flew the flag for raw, honest Northwest rock’n’ roll.
Grunge became a commodity in that misty faraway time 30+ (!!!) years ago, but it’s never been a fad to the true believers like me who still pull out their TAD and Melvins albums on a regular basis. And Mudhoney, who hugely influenced the direction that bands like Nirvana took global, have carved out a consistently cool indie career, sticking to Seattle’s Sub Pop Records and bashing out excellent albums every few years. Their early work like Superfuzz Bigmuff is essential, but don’t sleep on bangers like 2023’s Plastic Eternity, either. Nobody cares about this anymore in the age of influencers and hustlers, I guess, but Mudhoney never, ever sold out, man.
On Sunday night, Mudhoney gave us the pleasure of a well-honed band who’ve been doing their thing for close to 40 years but still loving it. Opening act Fork were a terrific choice – three teenage girls from Northland who smashed out a set like they’d been playing for decades. Like a cross between Sleater Kinney and Bikini Kill, they’re ones to watch.
A mostly genial mosh pit kicked in by the very second Mudhoney song, Gen X geezers and tattooed Gen Zers bopping along in cathartic glee. We remained on the periphery, a little too worried about our spines and hips to get right into it. I soon lost the wife for most of the show, hoped she was OK, we might meet again some day. By the finale I’d been pushed right in front of one of the speakers, hoping the earplugs did enough to save my hearing as “Here Comes Sickness” rolled over the crowd.
At 64, Mark Arm’s got nothing left to prove but you wouldn’t know it by the way he howled his way through Mudhoney’s greatest hits (I honestly don’t know how he has any vocal cords left after a gig). Late in the show he put his guitar down to really highlight his vocal showmanship with a tearing take on “The Lucky Ones” and a fierce performance of the evangelical takedown “21st Century Pharisees” from 2018’s Digital Garbage. Two days before the US midterms and less than a week before New Zealand’s election, there was a particular punch to lyrics like “Evangelical hypocrites / All of them in on the grift /Sanctimonious pieces of shit.”
Mudhoney’s tunes hew to a grunge template, but live, they sprawl in exciting directions – the one-two punch of their punk-pop classics “Sweet Young Thing (Ain’t Sweet No More)” and “Touch Me I’m Sick” had the mosh pit roiling, but then a brooding epic like “Beneath The Valley Of The Underdog” had a psychedelic vibe, allowing the crowd to bask in the guitar play between Arm, Steve Turner and Guy Maddison on bass. Stalwart drummer Dan Peters even got to bash out a few snappy drum solos in the course of the night.
Mudhoney are never anything less than themselves despite the legions of imitators that sprawled in their wake. Grunge was painted as dark and dreary by sneering hipsters after the boom passed, but Mudhoney puts the lie to that by the hefty helping of wry good humour in their songs – songs like “Suck You Dry” and “Here Comes Sickness” may sound like downers until you listen to then, but there’s an easy slithering charm to even the grungiest of Mudhoney tunes.
By the encore as “In ’N’ Out of Grace” hurtled through an epic jam (drum solo!), the black t-shirts dripped with sweat and ears were tingling, and Mudhoney seemed like they could keep going forever. Long may they rock.
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