Mudhoney’s recent show at Asheville’s Grey Eagle (10/10) was everything a Thursday night concert should be. It was loud, it was fast, it was in your face and raw as hell, starting with the first note of Pissed Jeans’ opening set and running straight through to the very end when Mark Arm and co. walked off the stage, not looking nearly as spent as they should have after such a fierce performance. It was a show not for people who were deep in weekend party mode or club-hopping in order to be seen, taking selfies in front of the stage and shouting at each other over the music. This was a show for people who are there for the music, pure and simple, and both bands on the bill delivered.
Pissed Jeans were the perfect band to prime the stage for Mudhoney, and I was honestly a little pissed off that I didn’t know of them before this tour. Frontman Matt Korvette owns the stage with a swagger like an angry Iggy Pop having a stompy-foot tantrum, driving the band’s sharp lyrics home over a heavy and furious musical backdrop and dropping in with a Cobain-esque drawl during the blistering “Half Idiot.” Pissed Jeans are party music for folks who aren’t really into partying, and the audience at the Grey Eagle ate them up.
Mudhoney’s performance was typically stellar, perhaps even better than the last time I saw them at the Grey Eagle in 2014. Their 30-plus years together have solidified their sound and make their performance seem effortless. Working through their catalog from their earliest songs to the latest from the darkly political “Digital Garbage,” their energy never wanes and their musicianship never falters. Mudhoney is known in some circles as the only real grunge band, and while their sound has always been an amalgamation of multiple genres, weaving together and emerging at different times, there’s no denying that theirs is a beautifully and authentically grungy sound. It’s dirty, warped, fuzzy, ringing in your ears and making you blind from the force of it, and if you tell me there’s a better way to spend a Thursday night than trudging toward the weekend wrapped in the force of these two smart and ferocious bands, sipping whiskey and enjoying one of the Grey Eagle’s incredible tacos, I won’t believe it.
