My Mudhoney back-catalogue is thin at best, but this is record the highlight by far. I hadn't seen Mudhoney when I bought it and only had their best-of compilation March to Fuzz, so I didn't know a great deal of their music. I found this live LP in Spillers early on in the Tuesday-Record-From-Spillers year and it was probably the limited run of 500 copies that drew me in (always a sucker for limited editions), or maybe there just weren't that many other records I wanted to buy that day. Either way, I was very pleased when I got it home and played it.
Mud Ride is a perfect opener in both the way it builds up and how it prepares you for what's about to happen. I didn't know that song before but enjoyed it greatly, so we were off to a good start. In fact, I didn't know any of the songs on side 1, but they're all great Mudhoney songs. Side 2, however, is where the hits are at - Touch Me I'm Sick, Suck You Dry and In & Out of Grace all get played and still work fantastically, despite their age. The highlight for me however is Hard-on For War, a song from their album Under a Billion Suns which hadn't been released when the show was recorded. The beat and the riffs are perfect and it's brilliantly cynical. When I finally saw them at All Tomorrow's Parties and they played this song, my friend turned to me at the end to tell me what a huge tune it was. I already knew this of course, but I was glad he agreed.
I've raved about Mudhoney on here before (I wrote about The Lucky Ones a while back), but it was this live album that made me much more of a fan than I was before. When they played that ATP I had very high hopes but they easily reached them. Maybe I still would've been amazed had I just gone to see them without having heard this record, but there exists the possibility that I might have missed them, which would have been a shocking mistake. As it was, they were amongst the bands I was looking forward to the most.
Format: 12"
Tracks: 11
Cost: £10 new
Bought: Spillers Records
When: 04/03/08
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: Download code
