Artist: Meldrum
Label: Frontiers Records
Release: 2007
It doesn’t get much worse than this! Meldrum, a trio of bored young women who kill time by hammering out tasteless, utterly empty, already-heard-a-hundred-times guitar riffs, and on top of that, with their forced act as angry chicks with no direction and no real ideas, stumble around the wasteland of their own musical world. Boring as hell!
Blowin’ Up The Machine is probably one of the most pointless things you’ve ever heard. The kind of album that, under some other regime, would be banned for good, and its consumers deported even more permanently. Ah, the good old days… anyway, few albums can “boast” such an uninteresting blend of different influences, from heavy Iommi-style motifs and Rammstein all the way to melodic HIM-style frills. You’ll probably be surprised when I tell you that in some of the songs you can even picture the near future, where Avril Lavigne, dressed in black and surrounded by fire, jumps around furiously to some cover of Highway To Hell. Until then, all you fans of the young “rocker chick” can satisfy your appetites with Another Kind, Scar and Get Yours. All three of them, with their hollow, content-free jumping from catchy yet heavily distorted guitar melodies to Michelle’s gloomy riffing, don’t impress in the slightest. The funniest thing about the whole affair is Moa’s hysterical vocals, and on Miss Me When I’m Gone she even gets help from none other than Lemmy Kilmister himself! Which raises the question of how much, if at all, the man benefits from flirting with this, let’s call it, amateur musical pursuit. We Motorhead fans can console ourselves with the thought that after all those years of mighty rumbling, it’s hard for Lemmy to tell the genuinely original from the plagiarized. I shudder to think of anything else. The next headache arrives with the disgustingly brutal Bite The Pillow. The track could easily be one of Zakk Wylde’s creations, the kind the guitarist probably cooked up on an especially bad day. It all points to a completely idea-free mission that the girls set for themselves. With such an unoriginal and boring approach, it’s of course doomed to fail from the start.
Plagiarism of the lowest possible quality also includes the claustrophobic Down Your Throat and Exploited, plus the dismal Creme De La Creme, which wear the listener down even further. Next to such expressionless, Black Sabbath-style stuff, Hang Em’ almost counts as a real “artistic gem”. This time the girls show at least a bit of musical know-how for the first time, which for most of the album stays buried deep under every kind of junk imaginable. And the junk has been piling up steadily from the very start. That’s probably also why Get Me Outta Here is the easiest track to make sense of, showing a softer side of our wild friends, trapped in some world full of feigned suffering. If only the poor things knew how much suffering they’ve inflicted on us with Blowin’ Up The Machine. Then again, maybe it’s better they don’t! Where would a man have to hide when their next record comes out?
Lineup
Michelle Meldrum: guitar
Moa Holmsten: vocals
Frida Stahl: bass
Gene Hoglan: drums
Lemmy Kilmister: vocals
Production
Michelle Meldrum
Tracklist
1.Purge
2.Down Your Throat
3.Scar
4.Creme De La Creme
5.Hang Em’
6.Miss Me When I’m Gone
7.Another Kind
8.Exploited
9.Get Yours
10.Get Me Outta Here
11.Bite The Pillow
Album length: 40.55
