The more the Melvins try to sound young, the older they get. This is true of many artists. Nick Cave immediately comes to mind: whenever he tries to rock nowadays, his first priority is convincing the world he still has sex appeal. But much like his testicles, there’s nothing left to get out.

Old people can rock as well as anyone else, but when they themselves presumably realize their vigor is slipping, desperate resistance only leads to a rubber-band effect. The Melvins’s Hold It In is their… something-th album. Who can even count? Almost never taking a break through their decades long career, the group has had time to explore many subversive sounds that have now come to be expected of them.

When you listened to a Melvins album, the only guarantee was that it’d be dirty and heavy. The now-geriatrics try to hold on to all previous traits, but because of that, lose the free-spirited nature that actually defined them before. It’s predictable unpredictability, if you will. It’s been embarrassing to pick up a new Melvins album the past several years to hear the same sludge riffs, same nonsense lyrics, same random but inoffensive noises, same jokes that we’ve been hearing for years only done worse than before.

Oh, they threw in a long, generic drone-y track! Oh, they did a satire of pop music (“You Can Make Me Wait”)… that’s actually better than almost anything on Hold It In. That’s conclusive enough to say it’s time for the Melvins to stop pretending they’re the Melvins, because whatever they think that is, it’s dead and passe. Like their last few, Hold It In is a completely unnecessary album that adds nothing to their career. At least they keep finding more new, old ways to redefine “nothing.”