What's there to say about the new Mudhoney album? That it's good? Yeah, well, Mark Arm, Steve Turner, Dan Peters, and the irrepressible Matt Lukin still are Mudhoney, and we are getting paid to express these self-evident truths that these Shadowy Knights Of The New New Super-Heavy Punk, these Sinister Ministers from the Land of Designer Lattes, Dessert Beers, Memory-Sucking Software, and Whatever, Nevermind - and 0, Lord, give us this day their Indie Cred - are 110 proof that not all rock bands are creating sequels.

Tomorrow Hit Today - the not-illogical follow-up to 1995's still-smokin' My Brother the Cow is also Mudhoney's first album that wasn't produced by somebody who wasn't a blooded-in member of their hometown Seattle Mafia, but by (drumroll, please...) the Man! the Semi-Legend! Jim Dickinson, hisbeautifulself.

Mrs. Dickinson's prodigal son deserves his own paragraph, so here 'tis: He played-the rocket 88s on the Rolling Stones' "Wid Horses" and at least 5,283 other Memphis-Miami-New York soul/rock/country sessions. He also produced Big Star, the Replacements, the Texas Tornados and a wide buttload of other bona ride loons 'n' luminaries, whom space and time does not permit...

"I'm still trying to figure out what he did," marvels Mudhoney guitarist Steve Turner. "I think he was a better listener. He was surprised at how steady our bass player, Maft Lukin, was ­ and I think that surprised us, too.

"If nothing else, Dickinson's got such amazing tales about everybody you'd ever want to know about. It was fully worth it just to pay him to hang out and tell stories. He'd be talkin' about somebody and then you'd go out there and play a song and maybe try to live up to those people or something."

Yeah, and that's Dickinson, down on the studio killing-floor, playing a vintage Vox Coloursound wah-wah pedal with his own two hands, while Turner's tapping the jack on a cord that's plugged into his amp ­ but not his guitar ­ to produce those and-then-my-mind-split-open sounds on the soon-to-be-famous fade of "I Have To Laugh."

'The more fucked-up the lead stuff got ­ like if I didn't have a guitar in my hand ­ the more Dickinson liked it," laughs Turner, who brought every one of his 30 fuzz-boxes that worked into the studio.

Speaker-shredding guitar FX ("Oblivion") and gnarly fuzztones that threaten to break up into globules of sound ("Real Low Vibe") aside, Tomorrow Hit Today splashes a wider variety of Mudhoney in your mind's eye.

Vocalist/guitarist Mark Arm says it's 'cause the headshop quartet finally took some time off. And yea, verily, they'd been on the golden road to unlimited devotion 'most ever since Arm and Turner first pissed in Green River ­ wherein future Pearl Jammers Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard also once soiled ­ way back in the daze of 1985, two years before Lukin dropped his professional trousers in the Melvins. And yea, merrily, this unholy trinity plus one Dan Peters, on traps and Bushmilis Irish Whiskey, has been Mudhoney for six albums, five EPs, and ten long years.

When they weren't busy helping the toppermost of the Sub Pop-permost indie label and just about every other band of distortion-worshippin' Morlocks in the 206 area code into their rehab mansions ­ the Mudhoneys created the touching anthem that rocketed Citizen Dick to S*T*A*R*D*O*M in the 1992 Singles film, played their own rockin' role in the 1995 Hype! documentary on the pungent sounds puked up from the Puget Sound surrounds, and shared big-screen time with late funnyman Chris Farley (doing a different version of "Poisoned Water" than appears on the new LP) in the 1995 cinematic opus Black Sheep.

In the meantime, the four boyos in the band named after the 1965 Russ Meyer movie, traded cover-battles with Texas troubadour Jimmie Dale Gilmore, cut spin-off discs under the noms de rock Monkeywrench, the Fall-Outs, the Thrown-Ups, Bloodloss, and the infamous Wylde Ratttz, drummed with the Screaming Trees, Thee Headcoats, Mike Johnson, and (of course) the Fastbacks, and ­ in Lukin's case ­ inspired Pearl Jam to write Śną record the mysterious song that bears his surname.

"We'd written a lot more songs for this album," says Arm, picking at the last thread of continuity, "and they were a lot more sparse than what we'd done on our previous records and, except for our cover of the Cheater Slicks' (contemporary Ohio trashmongers who record for the Anaheim, CA-based In The Red indie label) 'Ghost,' it's not just one big Wall Of Fuzztone."

Indeed, the mournful instro "I Will Fight No More Forever" takes its mouthful of a title from the surrender speech of Nez Pierce leader Chief Joseph, and "Night Of The Hunted" wouldn't sound any more out of place on a mid-'60s biker.movie soundtrack than it does as a seven-inch -single on Turnees own Super Electro label (which will be home to the vinyl version of Tomorrow Hit Today as well).

Mean-wild, "Try To Be Kind" is a lashing, slashing, slide-driven, woogie-boogie number, "Move With The Wind" is an ominous love song that attempts to answer the musical question "what do you do with a drunken sailor?", and "This Is The Life" finds the "47 miles of barbed-wire" of Bo Diddley's "Who Do You Love" redeveloped into "40 million miles of strip-malls."

"The new album's title flashes back to 'When Tomorrow Hits' from our first album," explains Arm. "So now it's ten years later and ­ WHAM ­ 'tomorrow hit today.'"

"I'm not much of a salesman, but the essence of the new record is expressed by the photo on the cover, a broken-down hotel on Aurora Avenue that's somewhere between strip-mall heaven ­ or hell ­ and street-walker row. The opening track (the lysergically inspired "A Thousand Forms Of Mind," featuring a tumescent organ line that's straight outta Dr. John, The Night Tripper) is all about possibilities and potentials, and by the time you get to the last tune ("Beneath The Valley Of The Underdog," a nod to Russ Meyer and Charles Mingus), all the possibilities have been exhausted. That pretty much sums up Tomorrow Hit Today."

Ah, yes, spoken like the former English major who penned the inspirational first verse to "Oblivion," wherein a woman orders a Kahlua and cream, rolls her wheelchair over to I the karaoke machine, and proceeds to sing the shit out of ABBA's "Dancing Queen." "That's a true story," shrugs Arm. "I hope it doesn't come across as just poking fun at a few people. I mean 'Everybody wants a good time/Everybody wants everything to be alright' is pretty inclusive."

Funnily enough, there's a whole lotta former English majors out there who can't seem to wrap their squawking heads around the concept that a band that insists on democratic composing credits ­ to which Steve Turner snorts, "When Dan Peters comes up with a drum part that spawns the song, who's to say that's any less important than the lyrics?" ­ especially one that doesn't have some ­ sort of penguin-in-bondage, cult-of-personality, Dory Previn wannabe for a frontperson, could even be capable of sarcasm, irony, or humor, let alone anything as S-E-R-I-O-U-S as the nightmarish look inside the balding pate of former U.S. Congressman (R-WA)-turned-"anti-choice" shill Randy Tate that jest happens to be the hidden bonus track tacked onto the end of this flipped disc.

"If it doesn't translate, it's almost better at times," says Turner philosophically. "Fuck you, if you don't get our jokes."