Melvins - 2014 - A Tribute to David Bowie

 

Amphetamine Reptile Records – Scale 136

The Melvins’ tribute to David Bowie begins with the train already moving. “Station to Station” was one of Bowie’s great machines, a long, cold procession joining soul music, European electronics, cocaine paranoia, occult imagery, and the arrival of the Thin White Duke. The Melvins preserve its forward motion but replace Bowie’s glacial elegance with something heavier, dirtier, and more physically unstable.
Buzz Osborne’s guitar does not imitate Carlos Alomar’s clipped funk or attempt to reproduce the original’s polished architecture. He treats the song’s central progression as a massive repeating structure, increasing its weight until every return feels like another railcar joining the train. Dale Crover keeps the rhythm deliberate, understanding that the song’s power comes from momentum rather than speed.
J.G. Thirlwell is the crucial choice. He does not impersonate Bowie’s distant aristocratic delivery. His voice is harsher, more theatrical, and faintly unhinged, making the Thin White Duke sound less like an immaculate fascist mannequin and more like a master of ceremonies shouting from inside an industrial furnace.
Thirlwell has spent his own career combining orchestration, noise, repetition, grotesque humor, and authoritarian performance. “Station to Station” already contained all of those possibilities. The Melvins simply pull them closer to the surface.
The Stylophone and keyboards preserve a trace of Bowie’s synthetic chill while the rhythm section keeps dragging the song back toward the body. Electronics flicker around the riff like warning lights inside a tunnel. The train is luxurious, but something is burning beneath the dining car.
“Breaking Glass” is a much shorter and more violent object. Bowie’s original from Low lasts less than two minutes, a fragment built from clipped guitar, fractured rhythm, and lyrics suggesting domestic cruelty without explaining it. The song ends before its scene can become a complete narrative.
The Melvins understand that incompleteness. They do not expand “Breaking Glass” into a long sludge exercise or force it to support more meaning than it can carry. Buzz makes the guitar thicker, Crover hits with greater weight, and Thirlwell delivers the words with the delighted menace of someone admitting damage while refusing remorse.
The title itself is perfect Melvins material. Breaking glass is brief, loud, irreversible, and followed by dangerous fragments. It creates an event whose consequences remain scattered across the floor after the sound has stopped.
The pairing captures two opposite sides of Bowie. “Station to Station” is monumental, controlled, and mythological. “Breaking Glass” is tiny, nervous, and brutally domestic. The Melvins make both songs sound like products of the same damaged machinery.
The Amphetamine Reptile clown artwork prevents the record from becoming tasteful Bowie worship. Bowie’s sleeves constructed identities through fashion, photography, typography, and immaculate control. HAZE XXL and Mackie Osborne answer with grotesque collectible faces and splattered vinyl.
Yet the performances are deeply respectful. The Melvins recognize that Bowie’s music was already strange, heavy, repetitive, and willing to place beauty beside ugliness without explaining the relationship.
The train crosses the European night. Glass breaks somewhere inside it. Thirlwell keeps announcing the next station while Buzz makes the engine heavier than the tracks were designed to hold.