Album Review: Digital Garbage by Mudhoney

Topical songs can be a tricky proposition for many artists striving to make timeless statements whenever they make a record. After 30 years together as a band, Mudhoney strike a remarkable balance between conjuring sharply ferocious punk soundscapes for songs whose lyrics go directly after the various and nefarious headline makers of the day.   While it's an era ripe for protest music, few American bands of Mudhoney's stature have stepped up to take on this anxiety-inducing and partisan landscape. For his part, singer and primary lyricist ….

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The twenty-first century is filled with noise. Notifications, video conferences and the President of the United States of America. There's no room to think. At all. You sit down for tea and uh oh, there's the 24-hour news blasting out of your telly. You go out for tea and... surprise surprise, the ….

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Some bands mellow with age, as their youthful fury gives way to a more understanding frame of mind. Mudhoney are clearly not one of those bands. The grunge pioneers have long thrived on snark the way other folks require oxygen, but since they returned to the indie ranks with 2002's Since We've Become Translucent, lead singer Mark Arm has been more eager than ever to vent his spleen on the troubles of the world around him.

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There are several readily available metrics that can help determine just how doomed our world truly is: increasing temperatures, rising ocean levels, species extinction rates, and so forth. But there is a less visible, arguably more accurate measure of gauging whether we're flat out fucked: those moments when Mudhoney get political. While they're never lacking in agitation and spite, the Seattle scuzz-punk pioneers tend to direct their ire at more, fish-in-a-barrel targets: posers, douchebags, themselves.

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Mudhoney Delivered An Epic Clapback And People Are Screaming! Mark Arm Is The Woke Bae We Need Right Now! Donald Drumpf, Sir, You Have Been Officially Cancelled By This Seattle Rock Band's Tenth Studio Album! Okay, I'm being facetious there, but I am being sincere when I tell you that, 30 years since their debut single, Mudhoney have released an astute, politically relevant and commendably fired-up garage punk belter of an LP. Aye, it blindsided me too. Not to overegg the pudding here - it's an angry social commentary album in the 80s punk tradition, you're unlikely to learn anything from its lyrics and at no point does it transcend its creators' identity as middle-aged white men (nor do Mudhoney purport to be anything else).

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Here comes sickness once more - Seattle veterans Mudhoney re-emerge from the wilderness for their first album in five years and, as you might expect, they're pissed off. Politics became a more obvious part of their oeuvre thanks to 2006's brass-bolstered 'Under A Billion Suns', which took aim at the George W Bush-led invasion of Iraq, but here the band's wrath takes on broader themes - the rise of the alt right, the depravity unleashed on social media, the pomposity of the baby boom generation… they're all here. This being Mudhoney, none of this is done subtly.

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