Released in 1987, Gluey Porch Treatments wasn’t just a debut—it was a seismic shift. At a time when punk was about speed, precision, and rebellion, Melvins took those same ingredients and slowed them down to a crawl. What emerged was something dense, sludgy, and completely unhinged—music that was less about melody and more about mood, tension, and the weight of sound itself. Gluey Porch Treatments didn’t just hint at what would become sludge metal; it practically carved the path forward in real time.

From the opening track “Eye Flys,” the Melvins lay out their blueprint with slow, ominous bass strums and scattered, thunderous drum hits. There’s not much movement in the song, yet it feels like something enormous is happening beneath the surface. The guitars ring out in eerie, empty spaces, and the vocals—high-pitched, almost witchy—hover like a curse. When the band kicks in more fully, it's with loose, sludgy riffs that feel deliberately sloppy and surreal, as if the music itself is staggering forward under its own weight. That sloppiness, which might seem like a flaw in most bands, is part of Melvins' genius—it feels intentional, like a rejection of polish and predictability.

Songs like “Echo / Don’t Piece Me” and “Exact Paperbacks” show the band occasionally dipping back into punk tempos but never letting go of that disjointed weirdness that makes them so singular. Even the faster tracks feel unstable, like they're stitched together with decaying tape. There's a push-pull happening between hardcore’s aggression and doom metal’s dread, and Melvins sit right in the uncomfortable middle. On “Heater Moves & Eyes,” things feel a bit more controlled—the riffs are tighter, the vocals raw but more in step with the beat. It’s one of the few moments where the band plays it relatively straight, and it only makes their usual chaos more jarring by contrast.

The murky, almost proto-sludge atmosphere reaches a peak with songs like “Influence of Atmosphere” and “Leeech.” Here, the guitars churn slowly, dragging riffs across the floor while drums crash like distant thunder. These tracks showcase Melvins’ unique ability to take minimal musical ingredients and turn them into something weirdly expressive. The playing is often off-kilter, and yet it’s emotionally effective. You can hear the seeds of bands like Eyehategod, Sleep, and Electric Wizard being planted in these grimy, repetitive riffs and primitive drum grooves.

“Happy Gray or Black” and “Glow God” lean harder into experimentalism. The former feels like a deliberately inaccessibly take on punk—jarring, tense, and chaotic, while “Glow God” stumbles with drunken-sounding riffs and loose rhythms that blur the line between structure and noise. It’s messy, yes, but it also challenges the listener to rethink what heaviness and aggression sound like when the tempo drops and the tones get weirder.

The album isn’t without highlights that verge on conventional heaviness. “Heaviness of the Load” lives up to its title, with dense guitar tones, massive drums, and one of the clearest vocal performances on the album. It’s still raw and unrefined, but it has a coherence that makes it one of the most powerful tracks in the collection. Similarly, “As It Was” brings the slow-and-heavy formula to its peak, with deep, chugging bass, slamming drums, and vocals that feel fully embedded in the soundscape. “Over from Under the Excrement,” the closing track, gives the album a grand sendoff with its slow-building pacing and crashing drums—like a crumbling structure falling in slow motion.

Despite its chaotic feel, Gluey Porch Treatments has a strange cohesion to it. There’s a throughline of mood and aesthetic that ties everything together: the witchy vocals, the off-kilter drum patterns, the way every riff seems to bleed into the next like a melted cassette. Even when a song like “Clipping Roses” or “Flex With You” feels like it's falling apart, there’s a sense that Melvins want it to. They’re dismantling the expectations of what a metal or punk record should be—especially at a time when most bands were chasing precision and speed.

And maybe that’s the most important thing about Gluey Porch Treatments: it wasn’t trying to impress. It wasn’t trying to compete. It was trying to break something, to fracture a scene that was becoming too clean and too safe. In that, it’s a true counter-statement. While hardcore was sprinting ahead, Melvins stood still—then started digging downward.

Gluey Porch Treatments is raw, messy, eerie, and occasionally frustrating. But it’s also foundational. It helped birth sludge metal, inspired doom’s weirder offshoots, and showed that heaviness could come from texture and tension just as much as volume or speed. Not every track hits, and some feel deliberately alienating, but the album as a whole is a monument to sonic refusal—a refusal to sound clean, to be accessible, to do what’s expected.

More than three decades later, it still sounds ahead of its time—and somehow heavier than most things that came after.

RATING: 7.5/10