Steve Turner and Mark Arm have great skin. Have you looked at any Seattle rockers lately? They haven't fared that well in the youthful appearance marker. If you've spent the last half the decade sitting on the couch playing your unplugged electric and the other half sitting on barstools waiting for the sound man to arrive, you'll know that it doesn't do a lot for your physique. So when the vocalist and guitarist for Mudhoney walk through the door positively glowing, you've got to wonder if they have some sort of Dorian Gray-style pact with you-know-who. But whatever they've been doing, it's working. They look good.

Steve Turner is wearing his signature tennis shirt, and Mark's famous hair is short again, subtly defying gravity in that "I'm not doing this on purpose" way. We're meeting to talk about Tomorrow Hit Today, the long-awaited follow-up to 1995's My Brother the Cow, and to catch up on all the grunge gossip, I've also come prepared to get conclusive evidence that Turner and Arm are among the smartest guys in the Seattle rock scene. For years I've been hearing rumors that these two are brainiacs, but I want proof.

They don't think much of the M.A.T. (Mudhoney Aptitude Test) that I have devised. It's a math and general knowledge test. The general knowledge questions were culled from the Horse Sense quiz in the P-I. The math problems came from an algebra textbook. I can barely do long division, so I had to look up the answers in the back of the book. (The same method I relied on in ninth grade.) Steve Turner takes one look at it and says, "Math. No way." Arm also skips over the algebra and delves into the first question about what fictional character had a pet seal named Esmerelda. "Well, it's got to be a process of elimination. It's not Tarzan, and I know Ahab did not have a pet seal." Turner hopes it's the Little Mermaid. Sorry, gang: it's Captain Nemo from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. They do a lot better locating the port city of Bilvao and naming the outermost of the planetary gas giants (Spain and Neptune). But when they get to the question "Who wrote The English Patient," they both toss the test to the wind. Turner announces, "These are girl questions!" and Arm inquires, "What was that all about?" I have a feeling I'm not going to walk away from the interview with any solid documentation of their brain power.

As we sit in a West Seattle restaurant, I ask about their former existence as Eastsiders. Turner supplies the biographical data, "He's Kirkland, I'm Mercer Island. That makes me 'countripolitan."" We have differing views on what constitutes the Eastside rock scene. I automatically think of Modest Mouse and Lync, wheras they cite Queensryche and Rail. That's old-school Seattle for you. No messing with emo.

This isn't to say that Turner and Arm are not up-to-the-minute on current rock. Turner is somewhat critical of what passes for punk these days. "As far as underground stuff goes, it's been getting farther and farther away from what I like. Like experimental noise stuff. I mean, it seems pretty played out after being in the Thrown-Ups. (I) know how easy it is to fake that shit. And post-rock - I don't even know what that means."

"It means 'after rock,'" Arm answers.

"Or, more-boring-rock," Turner concludes.

"It's a weird term that predicates itself on rock," adds Arm, "but it's not a thing in itself, like jazz or blues. It's a reaction. Or at least the people labeling it are reacting." Here I begin to realize that maybe I didn't need a stupid quiz to see how brainy Arm and turner are. They are with-it enough to know that it's only worth it to trash a band or style if you've been thoughtful enough to suss them out (and use words like "predicates").

So are Mudhoney ready to be grunge icons? We've never really embraced the term grunge before, but it's a historical fact. We're a grunge band."

As far as having historical perspective on the entire movement, they demur. Neither has seen Kurt and Courtney and Mark confesses he didn't even see Hype!. Do they have any interest in setting the record straight? Turner laughs and says, "We can't even remember the record. You can get five people to sit around and talk about what happened five or 10 years ago, and no one is going to agree."

It seems pretty safe to say that Mudhoney was actually there. Mark Arm and Steve Turner have the flawless grunge lineage of belonging to movement progenitors Green River. I think they saw Nirvana a few times. I actually feel safer knowing that they don't have any axes to grind about the whole dirty, icky, poopy music scene of Seattle's over-hyped '80s. But maybe they're just saving it for their memoirs.

So what does a grunge band sound like in 1998? It's still dirty, but let's just say that the dirtiness is probably achieved by better technology and a higher budget. Recording Tomorrow Hit Today with Memphis producer Jim Dickinson ensuring Mudhoney a brilliant sound recording. Dickinson's legend may be built on playin' piano with the Rolling Stones, but he has produced (among hundreds of others) Big Star, Aretha Franklin, Sam and Dave, the Replacements, and Bob Dylan.

The variety of guitar sounds on Tomorrow Hit Today is astonishing. The slide guitars whinny, the bass lines are swampy, and paradoxically, the distortion is so clean, you can pick out individual levels within a song. The vocals are also emphatic. Mark Arm sounds as snorty as ever, but a bit more world-weary. Whether it was recorded on 48 tracks or on a boom box, grunge has more to do with style than substance. It's that grunge attitude. And maybe that's turner and Arm's beauty secret. Hold onto something you love and stay forever long.