Steve Albini
Big Black to Shellac, the Chicagoan iconoclast’s own recordings. By Andrew Male.
“There was no point in entertaining notions of popularity.”
“WE KNEW Big Black were going to be making ugly, obscene music,” Steve Albini told Toronto filmmaker Daniel Sarkissian in 2020, “noisy music [with] limited appeal… There was no point in entertaining notions of popularity.” Initially conceived as a one-man project in 1981 in Chicago, Illinois, where Steve Albini was a journalism student at Northwestern University, Big Black began as an exercise in dissident misanthropy, inspired by the aggressive electronic minimalism of Tuxedomoon and Cabaret Voltaire; out-of-phase cheesewire guitars and militaristic machine rhythms allied to Albini’s in-character lyrics, nightmare reportage from the dark heart of a corrupted America.
However, as Albini himself insists, the ‘group’ didn’t truly exist until he was joined by guitarist Santiago Durango of Chicago punk band Naked Raygun, and later, bassist Dave Riley. The Big Black sound developed around the high, chiming train-yard wail of Durango’s Telecaster guitar – played through a distortion pedal and a Fender Twin amp – the relentless attack of the Roland TR-606 drum machine and Riley’s bass sound, marinaded in the cosmic slop influences of Funkadelic. Albini heightened the high-tensile sound by issuing twin-headed thin-copper guitar picks that hit the strings twice for “a sharp, zinging attack”.
When Big Black folded in 1987, they had become popular, the aggressive sound, misanthropic lyrics and coiled, skinny violence of their live performances attracting what Albini called “people [who saw] your music as an expression of their ugliness and hatred.”
Rather than mitigate that response, Albini doubled down.
His next group, formed with Scratch Acid rhythm section David Sims and Rey Washam, were named Rapeman, after a Japanese superhero manga comic. It was, Albini now admits publicly, an inexcusable act of provocation. Perhaps appropriately, that group split due to incompatible intra-band tensions, and Albini formed the group he’s been associated with ever since, Shellac.
Recorded during downtime from his full-time job as a recording engineer at his Electrical Audio studio complex in Chicago, Shellac are a hobby, an ongoing experiment in the power of analogue recording and what Albini has called “a 100-year commitment”. Shellac have recorded just five official studio LPs in 30 years, yet each one is worthy of ownership and comment. What we’ve tried to do here is place those records in the context of his entire career in a way that hopefully makes artistic sense, and, in the process, single out what makes Albini such a continually thrilling and iconoclastic music maker.
10 Shellac Excellent Italian Greyhound TOUCH AND GO, 2007
You say: “See Shellac live and you’ll realise how funny and weird and clever they are. This is the best showcase for that.” Lou Murrison, mojo4music.com
Shellac’s fourth LP (seven years after 1000 Hurts) is the group’s most experimental and arch and finds them in what Albini calls “light-hearted” mode. It repurposes The End Of Radio as an even more sparse and desperate cry for help (“there is no special girl!”), repeatedly stops and starts in its quest for purpose, quotes from Fugazi’s final LP The Argument, and in Genuine Lulabelle features a nine-minute nightmare Child Ballad interspersed by exploratory guitar and drum hammering, and the voice of Word Jazz poet Ken Nordine. Not a starting point for the uninitiated, but once you’re into Shellac’s world it’s great to hear them fuck things up like this.
4 Shellac 1000 Hurts TOUGH AND GO, 2000
You say: Is this Shellac’s most brilliant, most misunderstood record? There is an acoustic Frank Turner cover of Prayer To God that would support this opinion.” Nick Wickham, mojo4music.com
9 Big Black The Hammer Party HOMESTEAD/TOUCH AND GO, 1986
You say: “Racer X is a good ’un, and relatively overlooked. Love that cosmic industrial guitar sound.” Joe Banks @JoebanksWriter, via Twitter
This protean Big Black primer includes 1982’s solo Albini EP Lungs, plus 1983 Bulldozer EP with Naked Raygun’s Jeff Pezzati on bass and Pat Byrne assisting on the Roland TR-606, plus 1984’s Racer-X EP in which Byrne is ousted. The Lungs home-recordings are aggressive, distorted, mechanical but also very funny (“I’m a bricklayer/I kill what I eat!”). Thanks to Byrne’s drums, and the lack of distortion on Albini’s vocals, Bulldozer sounds echoing, chilly, hopeless. On Racer-X the use of the Roland is minimal, ruthless, perfectly suited to Albini’s tales of hired killers, speedaddicted delivery drivers, and weasel barroom cowards.
3 Big Black Songs About Fucking TOUCH AND GO, 1987
You say: “Cortex-crushing songs full of repressed anger, hurt and rage. A chastening listen!” DC Kneath, Swansea, via e-mail
Released amid the PMRC’s attempts to police explicit releases, Songs About Fucking is Big Black’s purposely incendiary farewell. The reductio ad
absurdum title also applies to the album’s sound, which took the Atomizer template and represented it as the blackest of self-parodies, showcasing the group at their absolute peak in their final throes. Side one (‘Happy Otter’, a manga term for an erect penis), road-tested live, is short, brutal, unassailable. The second side (‘Sad Otter’ = flaccid penis) features astonishing highs but was, the band later admitted, a forced exercise in finding their voice. “We realised there were [only] a finite number of ideas we could explore as Big Black.”
8 Shellac The End Of Radio TOUCH AND GO, 2019
You say: “The closest you can get to hearing how exciting they are in concert.” MW Carden, mojo4music.com
Culled from the band’s two BBC Peel Sessions, recorded a decade apart in 1994 and 2004, this is a document of band evolution. Straight from the opening cry of “Radio 1, play the drums!”, their debut session, recorded just prior to cutting is an absolute joy, the sound of Shellac as a (relatively) loose heavy rock trio. The 2004 session, a precursor to 2007’s
recorded live shortly after Peel’s unexpected death, is loose, improvised and continuously startling. It also features Shellac masterpiece The End Of Radio in its finest form, a valedictory, postmodern, sometimes comic farewell to broadcast radio, repurposed as a salute to Peel himself.
2 Big Black The Rich Man’s Eight Track Tape TOUCH AND GO, 2015
You say: “Kerosene is monstrous: an almost-but-notquite-entirely caged explosion of rawness, rage & pain. My favourite thing he’s done by far.” @MatthewJLyons, via Twitter
The 2015 remaster, not the brittle original. A compilation of 1986 debut LP Atomizer, plus the Headache EP/Heartbeat 7-inch from the following year. It still sounds like nothing else. Kerosene, My Disco, and Jordan, Minnesota soundtrack the horrors and desperations of small-town American life (paedophilia, self-immolation, infanticide) with pummelling, raw, brutalising, metal-onmetal noise, while Big Money, Things To Do Today and Pete, King Of The Detectives placed us in Albini’s nightmare noir landscape of hired killers, deadbeat gumshoes and corrupt cops. A complete, terrifying world fully realised.
7 Shellac Terraform TOUCH AND GO, 1998
You say: “Shellac take their time, stretch their legs, open up a little after the dry claustrophobia of Action Park. Funny, brittle, perfect.” @ cowsarejustfood, via Twitter
Their most underrated work, thanks, in part, to the divisive opening track, the eerily hypnotic 12-minute mantra of space, sound and rhythm Didn’t We Deserve A Look At You The Way You Really Are. Checkout after that track and you miss arguably Shellac’s finest-sounding record. Recorded at Abbey Road, utilising their collection of vintage microphones, it’s a warm, crunchy, aggressive collection of wry disquisitions, from the prowling, self-explanatory House Full Of Garbage to a wry tribute to Canada (“Imagine a country so blue/Backwards it’s “adanaC") and Copper, Albini’s Ken Nordine-esque paean to a “decent” material that “will never be gold”.
6 Shellac Dude Incredible TOUCH AND GO, 2014
You say:“This is how I like my Shellac: no fat, all power, but rich and complex – delicious.” Ben Sharp, via e-mail
Seven years on from the contrary and occasionally indulgent
Shellac returned in lean and healthy form with these 30 minutes of precise, controlled and surprisingly warm-sounding withholdand-release strafe-attacks. With its songs about dangerous group dynamics (Dude Incredible; Riding Bikes) and Founding Fathers (All The Surveyors; Mayor/ Surveyor; Surveyor), there may also be a conceptual coherence to Dude Incredible operating just below the surface, something to do with American ownership and collective violence, but the integrity is there in the music, even if it’s hidden in the words.
1 Shellac At Action Park TOUCH AND GO, 1994
You say: “This record contains Albini’s best and most ‘pop ’ songs.” Dan Wolff @Torrence79, via Twitter
As statement of intent, the debut LP from Steve Albini, bassist Bob Weston and drummer Todd Trainer takes some beating. Right from the opening track, the elastic crunch and grind of My Black Ass, here was a sound both familiar and unknown, the power trio model refitted with tungsten exo-skeleton, moving with unnerving, unreadable poly rhythmic precision. It is the sound of machines performing some horrible, never-to-be-defined action with relentless purpose, while the lyrics are abstract, overheard narratives plucked from the edge of reason. Allied to Albini’s jagged sawtooth guitar, Weston’s dread-purpose elastic bass and Trainer’s hieroglyphic drum patterns, they combine to suggest something vast, cinematic, brilliant yet unknowable.
5 Rapeman Two Nuns And A Pack Mule TOUCH AND GO, 1988
You say: “When I read he was teaming up with SA’s rhythm section I was very excited and it didn’t disappoint… caught them live, off me noggin on mushrooms.” @ MarkAlexPreston, via Twitter
While this might justifiably be the most overlooked Albinirelated release, thanks to that conceptually reprehensible band name (see intro), it’s also one of the strongest, and strangest. At first, it’s hard to find a location within the group’s alien sound. Albini’s distorted vocals seem too buried in the mix, the guitars too sharp to the point of piercing, while Sims and Washam’s bass and drums strike like blunt instruments. The band split due to tensions between Sims and Washam and Albini’s own hubris. That stress, agitation, arrogance and power-play is all part of the Rapeman sound.