No April Fools Jokes here, 17 years after originally recording the album, Three Men and a Baby from Mike & the Melvins is now officially out on Sub Pop Records! While 17 years was without question a healthy duration and at this point nobody involved is definitionally a baby, as expected the wait turned out to be well worth it! You should be able to find it in LP, CD, and even tape format both through your local record store and of course through the Sub Pop Mega Mart. There's even Mackie designed t-shirts to be had! For the time being you can stream the full album online thanks to Sub Pop & Rolling Stone:
"Now, the funny thing about that is, and you can't really tell, there's almost no guitar on it," Buzz told Rolling Stone about Three Men and a Baby. "I'm doing all the low-end bass, Kevin [Rutmanis, circa-1999 Melvins bassist is] doing all the slide bass and Mike's doing all the stuff that sounds like guitar. The whole idea was it was going to be three bass players. We got as far as we could get with that, and then it was time for him to do a bunch of vocals, and he just couldn't figure out what he was going to do, so he said, "I'll just take them home with me and then I'll finish them." And we never heard from him again. Just disappeared. Literally disappeared. Like phones disconnected. We heard that he moved out into the woods, then we heard some wild story about him getting whooping cough, which I was like, what is it, 1930?"
Mike Kunka was recently interviewed on Episode 9 of the Sub Pop podcast, he gives more info on Three Men and a Baby and also discusses his musical history in general. The interview starts around the 16 minute mark, check it out!
Rolling Stone also recently put together a countdown of the 100 Greatest Drummers of All Time. Dale of course made the list, they had this to say: "Crover's main gig is his ongoing 30-year-plus stint in unstoppable art-sludge institution the Melvins — equal parts earthquake machine, hard-sticking showman and ad hoc mathematician following the ebb and flow of Buzz Osborne's Beefheart–ian riffs. Fueled by his love for Kiss and Zeppelin, Crover's distinct sound comes from tom-toms that explode like cannons, metal slats that sizzle, double kick that sputters and a sweat-soaked attack that still hits harder than your favorite teenage punk."
Melvins are on tour! Poster art by Craig Horky