We've come not to expect too much from Mudhoney, grunge's most gleefully willful underachievers. Even when they re-teamed with veteran Seattle producer Jack Endino in 1995 to record My Brother the Cow, Mudhoney's best batch of Stooges-style fury since their early Sub Pop days, the same seventeen people noticed. Tomorrow Hit Today is even better, so we may have to start paying attention to these clowns – whether they want it or not.

Memphis-music legend Jim Dickinson (the Stones, the Replacements, Big Star), who co-produced the album, may not be a Stooges scholar, but he knows all the right old-school stuff, like where to lay a tambourine to add rhythmic inflection. He has sanded away a bit of the crud in Mudhoney's sound on Tomorrow but has made no attempt to civilize what's left, emphasizing the individual definition in Steve Turner's and Mark Arm's guitars to increase their combined power and highlighting the loose-limbed drumming of Dan Peters, who drives the band as never before. This is the album Neil Young really should have made with Pearl Jam.

"Walkin' 40 million miles of strip malls," Arm growls in "This Is the Life," but the singer's malevolence has mellowed into a kind of affectionate disgust. Mudhoney know it's a fucked world, but it's their world, and on Tomorrow they show how they've made peace with their itinerant place in it. One can see these guys "rollin' and stumblin'," as Arm puts it in "Try to Be Kind," into the bowels of the next century as grunge's version of grizzled, post-apocalyptic bluesmen. They wouldn't even have to change their clothes. (RS 797)

BEN EDMONDS