Among other, healthier spring activities, I spent a fair part of the Bank Holiday weekend introducing my three-year-old to The Beach Boys and Lightning Bolt and listening to “Superfuzz Bigmuff” – not on any particular grunge nostalgia binge, but because it has just been subjected to the extensive, deluxe, collector’s edition reissue treatment. There’s something mildly farcical about Mudhoney’s debut mini-album getting this sort of lavish reverence, of course. What was once a six-tracker, now lurches unsteadily across two CDs, totalling 32 tracks – the possibilities of a two-track seven-inch being afforded a 2CD extended package seem ever more plausible. But still, part of Mudhoney’s charm has always been how they take something rudimentary and drag it out inexorably. The Stooges only lasted for three albums, plenty of ‘60s garage bands worshipped by Mark Arm and co probably only lasted for a three-minute single. Mudhoney, though, have kept this schtick going, not hugely changed, for two decades now, no doubt amused by the irony of a studiously dumb, sloppy band becoming an institution. This month, Sub Pop have made the slightly odd decision to release this bumper “Superfuzz” package at the same time as a new Mudhoney album, “The Lucky Ones”. The latter is as likeable as ever, though perhaps not quite as good as the last one, “Under A Billion Suns”, and inevitably dwarfed by the heavy shadow of “Superfuzz Bigmuff”. It still sounds great, as you might imagine, augmented (as with previous reissues) with those early singles like “Touch Me I’m Sick” and the Sonic Youth split, “Halloween”, as well as various endless live tracks, demos of “Mudride” and such that prove, as if anyone really needed proof, that the nascent Mudhoney’s music wasn’t exactly finessed whenever they staggered into a studio. What’s most striking, though, is how all these recordings reveal a long-suppressed truth about the whole Pacific Northwest grunge thing – that it was actually much less emotionally complicated than most indie and alternative rock. I guess most mainstream views now memorialise the scene through the filter of Kurt Cobain and Nirvana, as a great anguished howl of the disconsolate and so on. As anyone who knows about Nirvana from some of their actual records (rather than the entirely creepy Cobain industry that seems to throw up another “revelatory” documentary about the poor guy every few months), there are plenty of ecstatic punk thrashes in the Nirvana catalogue. But still, thanks also I guess to some of Eddie Vedder’s ruminations, the slurry of Alice In Chains and later Soundgarden, the myth of Mark Lanegan and so on, the legend of grunge is inexorably tied up in misery. Mudhoney, and “Superfuzz Bigmuff” in particular, posit a brilliant alternative path, that you can trace all the way through to a Pearl Jam single like “Spin The Black Circle”, oddly. It’s a culture of wise and sometimes snarky men spending long years studying garage rock, metal, hardcore and so on, fetishising the most primitive manifestations of rock, then having a go themselves. It isn’t crude and primal because – as countless post-Nirvana analysts might have you believe – it’s the best way to tap into the crudest and most primal emotions. It just sounds that way because it’s dumb and exhilarating. The return of “Superfuzz” allows us, in a small way perhaps, to try and tamper with the received history of the Seattle scene. Usually, the picture that comes to mind is the NME shot by Martyn Goodacre of the youngish Kurt, kohl-eyed and soulful. Today, though, I keep thinking of another NME shot, again by Martyn, I think. It’s of Tad, live at the London Powerhaus, sailing into the faintly terrified crowd in a gigantic belly-flop of a stagedive. It’s stupid, thrilling and very funny. Like “Superfuzz Bigmuff” and the whole daft idea of grunge itself, maybe.

I was just Googling the line-up of All Tomorrow’s Parties in 2001, curated by Mogwai (whose still-exhilarating debut album, in deluxe reissue format, was playing five minutes ago). Looking back, I must have been in hog heaven: Godspeed You Black Emperor, Stereolab, Super Furry Animals, Labradford, Ligament, Shellac, Papa M, The For Carnation, the great and good of post-rock and, notoriously, Sonic Youth. Sonic Youth headlined on Saturday night, played an extensively improvised set, and managed to piss off quite a large proportion of their assembled fans (including, if memory serves, one or two members of Mogwai themselves, but don’t quote me on that). Heroically, the SYR series of releases is reactivated this month with “SYR7”, which turns out to be, on its A-side at least, 20-odd minutes of that free, elevated jam, now titled “J’Accuse Ted Hughes”. When I tried blagging a copy of this record a week or so back, the publicist expressed surprise that I remembered the show so fondly. Surely, she suggested, I’d slagged off the performance in NME? I denied this, albeit slightly anxious that I might be getting things terribly wrong. But then she found the clipping, and the review was written by James Oldham, another big fan of the band, who now runs Loog Records and A&Rs Duffy, amongst others. James described the gig as “something close to a living hell”. He writes about the first song, which may well have been “J’Accuse Ted Hughes”, like this: “At 10pm, Sonic Youth amble onstage and start playing what sounds like the run-out groove of ‘Bad Moon Rising’. After ten minutes of meandering two-note fluctuations, bassist Kim Gordon starts singing. Badly. Ten minutes later, the rhythm changes slightly and Gordon starts hitting a block of wood. Ten minutes after that, they’re still up there noodling away. . .” From then on, he starts getting really disparaging. Weirdly, though, take out the negativity, and it’s a fairly accurate description of this glowering, ominous piece – far more accessible, incidentally, than some of the SYR releases which have preceded it. There’s a rippling, meditative quality which is possibly reminiscent of something from the middle of “The Diamond Sea”, and it strikes me that what people found so alienating about the set was the lack of context. If Sonic Youth had framed this trip with even a minute or two of more conventional melody, such a longueur would have been assimilable. Here, though, it has the unanchored fervour of free jazz. Kim Gordon’s freestyle incantations, we can now hear, veer from “I will fuck you” to “I sent my poem to Good Housekeeping. They paid me ten dollars”. I have a new Free Kitten album, by the way, which I should get round to writing about in the next week or so. Anyway, “J’Accuse Ted Hughes” is backed by a 2003 studio piece called “Agnès B Musique”, a really lovely, humming piece of deep space drift played on and mixed by Jim O’Rourke, which reminds me a bit of an organic version of his glitch record for Mego that came out around that time. Bit of something Krautish here, too; Faust, maybe, at their most casually industrial. Whatever: it's good, it's probably a limited edition, and "SYR8" is due on July 29, featuring a 2005 performance at the Roskilde Festival where the band were augmented by Mats Gustafsson and Merzbow. Bring it on!