July 18 was a good night to be in Nashville if you’re into the heavier, weirder end of rock. Tomahawk was finally back on stage after a 13-year touring hiatus, and they brought the Melvins with them, which honestly felt right. Both bands have basically built entire careers on not sounding like anyone else, so seeing them on the same bill made a lot of sense. Plus Buzzo and Patton go together like peanut butter and chocolate.
Melvins opened, and they didn’t waste any time. Buzz Osborne and Dale Crover, with Steven McDonald and Coady Willis rounding things out, just came out swinging: heavy riffs, pounding drums, no warm-up lap. The set moved through sludge, punk, that off-kilter groove thing they’ve been doing for something like 40 years now. Songs would stretch out and go somewhere you didn’t expect; Trevor Dunn even jumped on stage at one point. That’s really the Melvins in a nutshell: you show up knowing it’s going to get strange, and it does.
Then Tomahawk came out, and the whole room changed. Mike Patton, Duane Denison, Trevor Dunn, John Stanier – the crowd’s reaction alone told you how long people had been waiting for this lineup to take the stage again.
Patton‘s still got it. He can go from this quiet, haunting thing to a full-on scream in seconds, and somehow none of it feels like a performance for performance’s sake. He was cracking jokes about bowling with the crowd one minute, totally locked in the next. That back-and-forth is a big part of why he’s still so fun to watch live. The rest of the band was right there with him. Denison‘s guitar was sharp and precise all night, Dunn’s bass held everything together without stepping on anyone, and Stanier, as usual, just doesn’t seem to get tired, powering through some pretty complicated rhythms like it’s nothing.
They played stuff from all over their catalog, but the real moment was hearing songs off Tonic Immobility live for the first time. And somehow it didn’t feel like “new songs vs. old favorites”; it all just sounded like them. That’s kind of the whole appeal with Tomahawk, honestly. A song can be dead quiet one second and explode the next, and it never feels like a gimmick. It feels like they know exactly what they’re doing, even in the moments that sound completely unhinged. Brooklyn Bowl was a good fit for it too, small enough to feel every bit of it, but still loud enough that the heavy parts actually hit, plus it was a hometown show to welcome the guys back. People up front were singing along, cheering after every song, just fully there for it. Tomahawk and the crowd were so into it, Patton and crew even gave them 2 encores!
Between the Melvins doing what they always do and Tomahawk sounding this locked-in after being gone for over a decade, the night didn’t really feel like nostalgia. It felt more like these guys never actually lost anything. They just got back up there and picked up exactly where they left off.
