Crystal Fairy pits together At the Drive In’s Omar Rodríguez-López, Le Butcherettes’ Teri Gender Bender, and Melvins members Buzz Osborne and Dale Crover. Their sounds prove strikingly complementary.
It’s always a good idea to approach supergroup-type projects with caution, no matter how enticing they might look on paper. After all, when artists from well-known bands come together, they face the near-impossible challenge of sounding enough like their main acts while also breaking new ground—and usually without much time to gel. The new group Crystal Fairy pits Melvins core members Buzz Osborne and Dale Crover alongside Le Butcherettes frontwoman Teri Gender Bender and Butcherettes collaborator/producer Omar Rodríguez-López, most famous as the driving force behind the Mars Volta and At the Drive In.
Crystal Fairy doesn’t put any new twists on the established sounds of Le Butcherettes or the Melvins, but it does prove the groups to be remarkably complementary. The quartet’s self-titled debut grafts Gender Bender’s dynamic vocal style onto the Melvin’s rhythmic trudge—apparent immediately on opener “Chiseler,” a quick-and-dirty uptempo riff rocker. Coming from such a creative bunch, the straightforward character of Crystal Fairy is surprising, but the strong, pre-existing rapport between its two pairs of players helps. After 30-plus years together, Osborne’s guitar riffs and Crover’s drumming are pretty much conjoined, while Rodríguez-López has helped upgrade Le Butcherettes’ scrappy neo-psychedelia into a vivid backdrop for Gender Bender’s outsized presence to roam free.
Crover and Osborne have worked with strong musical personalities before, including Jello Biafra, Mike Patton, and Lustmord. This time, though, Osborne may have found a long lost twin in Gender Bender. She comes across as more vulnerable and agitated, but Gender Bender also shares Osborne’s penchant for stagy, absurdist delivery. Here, she practically plays the role of Osborne’s alter-ego, only with a relish that charges the Melvins’ sound with an urgency it typically lacks. And by introducing a harmonic breadth the Melvins have never captured before, she brings new contours to their ongoing fascination with re-appropriating Sabbath, Kiss, and other classic rock tropes.
Gender Bender has a flash of mad inspiration on “Drugs on the Bus.” Her Farfisa part meanders spiderlike across the sludgy main riff, and when she wails about a woman who cuts her own eyes out in the climax, the mood intensifies starkly. She gets to channel her inner Jello Biafra on a cover of ’80s hardcore outfit Tales of Terror’s “Possession,” which recalls the springy cadence of the Dead Kennedys classic “California Über Alles.” And while the funereal riff that anchors “Moth Tongue” is indistinguishable from countless other Melvins tunes, Gender Bender scrapes the back of her throat on her high notes, allowing a glimpse of what the Melvins might sound like if fronted by the banshee wail of Rush’s Geddy Lee.
Crystal Fairy concludes on an anticlimactic note, as the final stop-start stutter of the short-fast “Vampire X-Mas” simply fails to resume when the band has set you up to expect that it will. It sounds intentional, but the track also leaves a lingering feeling that the album ends unresolved. That’s a minor quibble, though, after 40-minutes of hearing people play together with far greater affinity than anyone could have expected.
