King Buzzo and Trevor Dunn – Live in Leeds 2024 – “acoustic, nasty, dirty and loud”

Live at Boom, Leeds 6th October 2024

At this point in his career, Buzzo has earned the right to do what he wants. Having plowed his own furrow since the early eighties, with the Melvins, Fantomas, Crystal Fairy and assorted duos or solo projects, he has become his own genre and a cult audience wants to hear whatever iteration of him they can, whether it is Buzz, Buzzo, King Buzzo, Roger Osbourne, or whatever. Hence a full room in grotty rock club, Boom, in Leeds.

This feels an arty project, with Trevor Dunn an equal partner, even if not as big a name draw. An avant-garde bassist, he mauls his double bass, intently cherishing it at the same time he abuses it. Bringing a history of many collaborations with John Zorn as well as the Melvins and other projects on Mike Patton’s Ipecac label, he has a raft of clever technique.

It’s a simple set up – King Buzzo to my left, Trevor Dunn to my right, making it in your face with no clever effects beyond presence and personality. Buzz Osbourne’s of course is grumpy, angry, intense soul, the face of a self-possessed sixty year-old beneath that shock of hair, which has it’s own role in visual percussion, shaking at key moments.

The sound is also almost simple. A detuned acoustic guitar providing the primary rhythm, occasional declaimed angry vocals, and the double bass sometimes providing a throb, sometimes strange colour. Buzzo manages to provide the heaviness of Melvins on an acoustic guitar, making the speed and feel sludgy and maximally heavy. It’s the opposite of those ‘Unplugged’ albums, where acts drift towards folky prettiness – this stays nasty, dirty and loud.

Dunn moves from soulful bowed work, to plucking, to almost wrenching the strings off, to adding a clothes peg to a string for random resonance, to grating the strings with wood, to shoving his hands behind the strings. At one point he looks like he’s giving the body a massage. Mostly a commentary and additional rhythm, there are frequent short passages where Dunn indulges himself. As Buzz has said; he “has the ability to make his bass sound like an oil tanker crashing into a coral reef.”

Most of the material is from Buzzo’s solo work or the 2015 album and recent EP Dunn and Buzzo recorded. As the set goes on, more Melvins tracks and obscure Easter Eggs pop up to delight the crowd. Not a chatty man, this is Buzz’s way of getting a reaction beyond us staring at his scowl. A cover of The Dick’s ‘Sidewalk Begging’ is a highlight, full of sadness and anger. It contrasts with the heavy silliness of Kiss’ ‘Shock Me’ that closes the hour-long set. In between we have ‘Suicide In Progress’, ‘Revolve’ from the nineties, and the obvious crowd pleaser – ‘Boris’. As Osbourne snarls “I say I can’t but I really mean I won’t”, we draw a breath at the attitude and then again at Dunn’s in-depth explorations on his bass.

Having sounded as fresh and new as he has in ages earlier in the year with the Melvins’ ‘Tarantula Heart’, full of experimental fun and heavy heaviness, this shows again the arty heart of Buzzo and the willingness to be playful as a means of discovery. Either of these players would be too much themselves for solo sets but together they press and push each other into new shapes, new efforts and helpfully stretch expectations. A glimpse of the things you can do to bust up a stultified genre, this was a focussed hour that felt shockingly short and the end like waking from a fever dream.