We've Got A File On You: Melvins' Dale Crover

On many of the Melvins’ greatest songs, drummer Dale Crover is really the soloist.Listen to the opening drum clatter on “Hooch” that kicks off their landmark 1993 album Houdini, ham-fisted but hyper-precise, a weird architectural construction that takes mere seconds for Crover to build and then topple spectacularly before our eyes.

Listen to those woodblock thunks on “Lizzy,” which glint like distant lights in a dark, dismal swamp.The Melvins’ lyrics are famously inscrutable, and there’s the sense in their best music that the drum part is as likely to carry the song’s “meaning” as the words.

Crover is such a marvelously expressive drummer that his decision to go kit-to-kit with Big Business’s Coady Willis during the band’s acclaimed late-2000s run scanned as an enormous risk — but taking enormous risks is something the Melvins have been great at for their entire career, from their origins as the slowest band in Montesano, WA to their current status as a beloved cult band whose entire career feels like a wilderness period.Crover, alongside shock-haired singer-guitarist Buzz Osbourne, is the only member of the band who has stayed consistent across all incarnations; even when they reconnected with original drummer Mike Dillard as Melvins 1983 for their excellent 2013 sludge-punk romp Tres Cabrones, Crover stayed on to play bass.

Yet he’s stayed busy with countless side projects and solo projects, on many of which he plays the role of singer-songwriter — including Glossolalia, his third album under his own name, which releases Friday.As a solo artist, Crover’s tastes lean towards ’60s pop and ’70s hard rock, bubblegum kitsch and proto-metal riffage, with KISS as a guiding light ever since the Melvins’ KISS-inspired move to release separate solo EPs by each member in 1992.

And though it’s technically “solo,” it features an enviable cast of collaborators, from garage-rock firebrand Ty Segall to Soundgarden’s Kim ...