The first great grunge band from Seattle have composed the last great grunge record. That this has been accomplished so long after the fashion for flannel has expired is a delicious irony Mudhoney seem uniquely equipped to savor.

Mudhoney got by for years on a riff and a phrase, delivered with piercing intensity but tossed off as if the quality of their work were irrelevant. So the force of "Touch Me I'm Sick" was balanced by a propensity for filler, culminating in the deplorable Five Dollar Bob's Mock Cooter Stew EP. Instead of sinking into that mire, they have managed an album's worth of songs that matter, every last one. My Brother the Cow reunites Mudhoney with producer Jack Endino, whose sound defined early Sub Pop. For the first time, the band entered the studio with more songs than were absolutely required. The result is stunning.

Riffs and phrases have expanded into comparatively elegant structures. Steve Turner's guitar lines have evolved from stuttering pidgin English into full-blown sentences, perhaps whole paragraphs, including a joyous slide-guitar sound. He won't be teaching at the Guitar Institute of Technology any time soon, but there is a crispness with which the whole band approaches these songs that can only come from years of playing together.

Still, Mark Arm remains the centerpiece. Inquiring minds will want to name-check the thinly veiled "Into Yer Shtik," and it is hardly possible to understate the bitterness with which he delivers the line "Why don't you blow your brains out, too?" Far more intriguing signs of growth appear in "Today, Is a Good Day," which, for all its apocalyptic imagery, seems to genuinely delight in survival and in repeated references to family and God (both of which hark back to Arm's conservative Christian upbringing). Grunge is dead. Long live grunge. (RS 705)

GRANT ALDEN