What album marked the beginning of grunge?
No genre is developed in a vacuum. Even if someone tries to launch an entirely new genre based on one album alone, there’s a good chance that said album is either going to be a disaster or fall flat on its face due to either the lack of songs or the layers of pretension that it rode in with. There was nothing pretentious about grunge when it first rose to prominence, though, but when was the moment when the entire style first started?
Before we start, it’s important to know that to call “grunge” a specific genre would have been laughed out of the room by any veterans of the Seattle rock scene. Every band was known for playing something completely different, and while it’s easy to tell the disparate styles of Alice in Chains and Soundgarden now, it was much easier for everyone to be placed in one musical bubble rather than worry about specific genres.
But there were some common themes throughout every band in Seattle. All of the music seemed to sound like it was from the city, and since this was a part of the US where half of the days of the year are either overcast or rainy, hearing them write some of the heaviest music brought to mind the kind of feeling of jamming in someone’s basement because it was too dreary to play an outdoor show.
And once ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ came out, all the labels got was a nice image to model everything around, with most of them adopting the flannel shirts and Doc Marten boots as a symbol for what the 1990s fashions were going to be. Looking back at where everything started, though, a style that seems synonymous with the 1990s actually managed to get its start midway through the 1980s.
So what was the first grunge album?
When talking about the grunge era, it’s important to discuss the labels behind everything, and while Sub Pop Records got its start at the time, C/Z Records were ahead of the curve when putting out the album Deep Six. The whole thing might exist as a standard compilation album of indie music, but every single one of the bands has connective tissue to the greatest names in the Seattle scene.
Outside of being one of the first projects to feature Soundgarden songs, including Melvins’ tunes was the best way to introduce someone to the Seattle sound, taking everything from Black Sabbath heaviness to Frank Zappa’s humour and putting it under one roof. While The U-Men and Skin Yard gave the tape credibility among the punks of the world, Malfunkshun was also one of the few standouts that took things in a new direction.
Their songs on the tape, like ‘With-Yo-Heart’, are far from the greatest tunes in the world, but introducing the world to Andy Wood was not only a preview of Mother Love Bone but also of the stadium-rock ethos of Seattle. Even if Wood didn’t see his band make it big, this was the best example of what grunge could sound like at its best, taking the crux of 1970s rock and combining it with either a semblance of irony or something more introspective.
So while Deep Six doesn’t seem to impact the world in the same way that records like Nevermind or Badmotorfinger did later, it does stand as the first rumblings of what Seattle had to offer. The flavours of the day were still acts like Poison and Winger, but there was definitely a change coming on a few miles north.
