My Goodness reinhabits grunge

A good 20 years late to the dance, My Goodness is a Seattle-based blues-rock power duo that seems bent on re-inhabiting grunge. No complaints from me. Among my all-time favorites include Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, and Mudhoney. Aside from the obvious health risks of being in a grunge band, I still wonder why that music ground to a halt.

Pearl Jam, by now the senior citizens of grunge, still take laps around the globe and make the old bones rattle, but not so much fresh energy has come along until a bassist named Joel Schneider borrowed a guitar and an amp and began working out with a drummer in a private rehearsal space a couple of years ago.

Not to be confused with Goodness, another grunge-era band, My Goodness owns the sound of guitar sludge and hammer drums that were vital to the mission, which was essentially designed to kill off the androgynous persona (and over-inflated egos) of big-hair rock. Big hair was about makeup and falsetto and arena ham as much as it was about technical prowess; grunge wore manly flannel, skipped baths, screamed, and reached way outside the box to make guitar noises that R.L. Burnside must have been proud of. Not a shred of this has been lost on Schneider.

Four years ago Schneider put My Goodness onstage at a bar he worked at. It was a talent show, kind of, for employees’ bands, and the reaction must have been encouraging. He stayed with it, switching out drummers for high school friend Andy Lum in 2012. Together, they have a stage energy that reminds one of Nirvana’s best days, and they sound like ten musicians instead of two. The over-amped blues-grunge thing is working for My Goodness. But will their success be a call to action for more bands to do the same? One can only hope.