Pop Reviews : Mudhoney: Sloppy, Sincere and Loud

Seattle breeds loud, sloppy metal where Los Angeles breeds teen-age glam-rockers in lipstick. Of the Seattle bands to emerge in the last year or so--including Mother Love Bone and Soundgarden--Mudhoney is the one you wanted to be jumping up and down to at Bogart’s on Thursday, a long-neck Bud foaming over your wrist. Sometimes Mudhoney was rough like the Stooges, sometimes tightly packed like early Wire, sometimes loose and wild and funky like primo Blue Cheer.

Is it cooler to be the Blue Cheer of your generation than the Who? Well, yes. You can let your guitars feed back as much as you want. You can play metal riffs as loud as you want, which is infinitely more satisfying than playing loud pop songs.

If you’re ferocious, sloppy and sincere, small numbers of people will think you’re close to godhead, and appreciation of you will become a sign of cultural literacy to scruffy humanities students on campuses across the nation--where R.E.M. and the Replacements are available to any co-ed with a white Rabbit convertible. By the time you master your instruments and the craft of songwriting, your career will have ended, so you might as well go for the gusto.

Where the opening band, Boston’s indie-pop Lemonheads, droned through a set of precise post-Husker Du college-radio punk, Mudhoney got lost in the middle of songs, blasted riffs copped from Wire and Black Sabbath, shrieked greasy, fuzzed-out guitar solos that seemed mailed in from Mars, bellowed unintelligible lyrics . . . awesome. Just awesome.