Bob Mould- Workbook

Workbook opens with a cool Leo Kottke-esque guitar opening. It’s impressive, it’s nice, it’s pleasant and it is like nothing else on the album. This album is nineties alternative in the rough, and the title is apt. This album was a workbook for other artists at the time to come up with their sound.

Bob Mould does not look like a rock star. Bald, white beard, thick-rimmed glasses. He looks like your dad who’s really into grunge, and plays his vinyl on a turntable next to a dust covered bass guitar. But then you find out he came before grunge was a style, and you realize “Oh, he created it.”

Grunge is understood by Wikipedia as a blend of punk rock and heavy metal. But I like this quote from Sup Pop producer Jack Endino: grunge is “seventies influenced, slowed down punk music.” If that’s the case, Bob Mould has slowed down, and quieted down, but he doesn’t have that edge that punk rock and heavy metal have.

I keep coming back to the song “Strangers Like Me” by Phil Collins off the Tarzan Disney movie soundtrack. Listening to it now, I see that that’s because Phil Collins has a similar vocal cadence to Mould, and Mould has a certain bombast, but none that could equal Collins. It wouldn’t be inaccurate to say that if grunge is punk slowed down, Mould is Phil  Collins slowed down. But that would do Mould a disservice. There is true creativity here.

This is an album with lessons to teach. To an upcoming musician like Kurt Cobain or Eddie Vedder, this is a class on toned down, if not dark, rock music. This is an album that is hard to classify because it is between genres; it doesn’t fit into any easy mold.

4/5 If you like grunge, check this out. It could take a couple listens, but you’ll get it. If you don’t check out the song “See a Little Light,” and that might get you into the rest of the album.