We at Pitchfork are tired. We're lonely and exhausted, and to top it off, someone left the window open. We've spent countless hours over the past few months slaving over our Top 100, pouring over our collections, intently listening to virtually anything we could get our hands on. During the first few weeks, our girlfriends laughed at us. Soon, they stopped laughing. Then they left.

I was listening to Dinosaur Jr's Green Mind for about the 12th time when she said, "What is it with this goddamn list? Do you like all this music better than me?" She always had this way of posing a question so there were really only two answers to it-- one that triggers a thermonuclear meltdown, the other complete capitulation and emasculation. I wasn't skipping down that path anymore. Instead, I just started explaining how she always asked the same damn question and how fucking annoying it was.

Then she did this thing with her face. I can't quite explain it, except to say that it could only have been brought on by extreme anger. Mistake me not-- it wasn't an angry face, it was just plain anger. On someone's face. It was pretty fucking edifying. "C'mon baby," I said, backtracking. "You get the waffle iron, I'll put on Slanted and Enchanted and we'll make up real nice."

So now I sit here with the latest Mudhoney album in one hand, the waffle iron in the other, and plenty of time on the pair of them. I can't really blame the list. I didn't need much of an excuse to lock myself in my room with the Red House Painters' catalog for a weekend, but that's beside the point. See, I've had some thinking time and I've been thinking about you. And I've been thinking about me. And I've been thinking about the '90s. I mean, at the end of the decade, are we (the three of us-- you, me and the '90s) really any better off than we were when we started? After all that gyrating and noisy posturing, doesn't it all just seem like... gyrating and noisy posturing?

The '80s, by all accounts a desert of cultural advance, at least left us in better shape than she found us. The '90s, on the other hand, fed us a few drinks, fucked us with a cynical smile and left us alone to our pounding heads and aching rears in the morning. Of this sad reality, Mudhoney is a perfect example.

At ground zero of the grunge explosion (seeing as Microsoft headquarters is just a short drive from downtown Seattle, shouldn't my spellcheck recognize "grunge" by now?) in the Northwest, Mudhoney was a pillar of the musical movement that came the closest to spilling over into a cultural one during the decade. That it came to a derivative of punk, whose sneering nihilism was born out of just such intersections, provided enough irony to make the music of the decade an analyst's wet dream. There seemed to be enough to chew on and nourish us for 20 years, let alone 10.

Now, just a few years later, I'm listening to Tomorrow Hits Today (it sure does, brother), and I'm wondering who exactly is going to care whether I like it or not? Here's a band whose fifteen minutes of cultural relevance has come and gone, through no great fault of their own. Then I noticed that the album was produced by Jim Dickinson, who worked with Big Star on Sister Lovers, and the Replacements on Pleased to Meet Me. I was overcome at once by both a terrible melancholy and a faint hope, both of which were validated by the album.

Mudhoney were always a bit closer to metal than some of their more renown brethren and, for the most part, the tracks that cater to those inklings sound hollow. When the band lends an ear to Dickinson's more straightforward rock instincts on tunes like "Night of the Hunted" and "Poisoned Water," they find more success and maybe some indication that the past might somehow propel us to some better future. Now, back to the waffle iron...

-Neil Lieberman