Melvins Drummer Dale Crover Announces ‘Fickle Finger of Fate’ Solo LP

Longtime Melvins drummer Dale Crover has some busy days ahead: in addition to a slew of band-related projects on the horizon, he'll be releasing his debut full-length album, The Fickle Finger of Fate, later this year.

Crover spoke with Rolling Stone about the new LP, which is due Aug. 4 and combines new material with a dozen drum sketches first captured for a limited-edition lathe record released in 2016. As he told the magazine, although the idea for a proper solo outing had been on his mind for some time, the actual recording process happened pretty quickly — by necessity as much as by design.

"I've been thinking about doing some sort of solo thing for a while. It's something I've had in the back of my mind to do," said Crover, explaining that once Melvins got off the road last October, "I knew I had to get in there right away and start doing stuff, because I knew that we'd eventually be recording more Melvins stuff as well. We just worked on it from October through the winter."

The Fickle Finger of Fate has already been led off with the pre-release track "Little Brother," which you can stream above; according to Crover, the overall set reflects a melting pot of influences. "Cheap Trick? Beatles? Any of that stuff. Beatles, I suppose," he mused when asked to identify the acts that helped shape his melodic side. "I grew up on the Beatles and the Monkees. Obviously, Neil Young has always been a big influence. I think one of the songs came out sounding more like Neil Young than I had planned."

The album is scheduled to arrive in the midst of Melvins' 2017 summer tour, which will itself surround a flurry of band activity: a documentary about the group, Colossus of Destiny, is on its way to home video, and their new double album, A Walk with Love and Death, is slated to arrive alongside a short film on July 7.

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