Since the heaviest that the radio got at the time were bands like Poison and the third or fourth resurrection of Alice Cooper, Seattle acts were looking to do anything to get their records played, and Deep Six was practically a starstudded lineup of bands that no one had heard of yet. The label had already put out compilations like Sub Pop 100 with underground favourites like Sonic Youth, but this was a family affair between all of the biggest names in the Pacific Northwest music scene.

Even if you don’t know the names on this compilation, you can pretty much guarantee that you know the people behind them. A band like Malfunkshun may have quickly dissolved after 1990, but vocalist Andy Wood is still known as one of the most important figures in grunge, having turned in time with Mother Love Bone and being the inspiration behind Alice in Chains’s ‘Would’ and the supergroup Temple of the Dog after his passing.

Though they sound the least radio-friendly out of the bunch, Melvins is probably the closest to grunge than anyone else on the compilation. When describing the sounds of sludgy rock and roll combined with art rock tendencies, songs like ‘Grinding Process’ are exactly what you want to hear, almost veering towards groove metal with how guttural it sounds.

Then again, there’s the one outlier that already seemed ready to go: Soundgarden. Although Chris Cornell hadn’t yet adopted his Robert Plant-esque yelp in full, hearing him try his hand at something more metallic feels like you’re being sucked into another dimension where he was born on the other side of the world and was the lead singer for Anthrax.

Not all these bands were meant to go the distance, but even if they failed here, the ground was being laid for something. Green River may have had a high pedigree at the time, but the fact that they split up shortly after this led to us getting both Pearl Jam and Mudhoney for the price of just one band.

And while Skin Yard might be an also-ran by comparison, guitarist Jack Endino would have much more credibility than just about anybody in the Seattle scene. He may not have had the hooks behind him, but his way to work in a studio led to him producing some of the biggest names in Seattle, being a part of Soundgarden’s early demos and producing all of Nirvana’s debut album, Bleach.

Although Eddie Vedder and Kurt Cobain hadn’t shown up, Deep Six is an interesting piece of history showing the genre in its infancy right before it exploded. There are even pieces of where the genre would go later in here as well, with some of the Melvins’ tracks sounding like something that a band like Sleep could have performed years later.

Deep Six is never going to share the same limelight that albums like Nevermind or Ten do, but there’s a good chance it doesn’t really need to. No one was really expecting much out of this record at the time, and even with heaps of praise given to the greatest alternative albums that have come out since, it’s nice to hear the genre starting where each band sounds like they were having a good time.

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