Choose Your Steve Albini
The late Chicago-based engineer played guitar and sang for three primary bands: Big Black, Rapeman and Shellac
It’s a dilemma almost worthy of a vintage Buzzfeed quiz: Which kind of Steve Albini fan are you?
The late recording engineer, singer, guitarist, irascible wit and poker champion, who passed away Wednesday at the age of 61, poured the great majority of his creative artistry into three live and studio projects. Most of the people who’ve heard them prefer one or the other — or none of them. Lyrically, in interviews and in zine articles, Albini could be deeply difficult to warm up to; his earliest public life, as he’s freely acknowledged in recent years, was lived as a sort of edgelord’s edgelord. Yet a certain undeniable, confident charisma prevailed, and you can still hear and feel that manic gravity in the discography he leaves behind as the frontman of Big Black, Rapeman and Shellac. Which flavor of Albini you prefer might say something about you.
While still a journalism student at Chicago’s Northwestern University, he formed Big Black in 1981 with members of Naked Raygun. No drummer, though – just a Roland TR-606 drum machine affectionately named “Roland” – which helped set the band apart somewhat apart from the punk and underground scenes that nurtured them. The sound was twisted, sub-industrial, lunging, and severe, an alien not-quite-dance party that Albini hosted for seven years. He knew his way around a hook, and Big Black is, for all its darkness, his most accessible outfit.
Consider the brawny “I’m A Mess” from 1983’s Bulldozer EP or the moody “Bad Houses” from 1985’s Atomizer or the rampaging “L Dopa” from 1987’s Songs About Fucking; beneath the bitter testosterone seethe, programmed beats, and serrated riffs – all arranged and arrayed for maximum sturm und drang – lurk tunes one can hum along to. And this was true as early as “Steelworker,” the lead track from 1982’s Lungs EP, where Albini’s bristling brute’s soliloquies fall almost willfully out of step with Roland’s thumps; that tension conjures up a void that flocks of darting, teasing guitars dash in to fill. It’s all a bit daft, vaguely disco, and either extraordinarily cartoonish or cravenly offensive, depending on the listener – but if you’re still listening (and loud), the hurts and resentments bedeviling you dissolve on dance floors or in slam pits, real or imagined.
Rapeman — Albini took the unfortunate name from a Japanese manga series — existed from 1987-1989 and featured an actual drummer, former Scratch Acid member Rey Washam. Earlier today, while revisiting sole 1988 full-length Two Nuns and a Pack Mule in preparation for this piece, I attempted to explain the trio’s sonic aesthetic to a friend.
“It’s sort of scum rock/metal, but not exactly punk or grunge,” I wrote. “It’s raw. It sounds like the Jesus Lizard did later, but that’s probably because their bassist would eventually play in the Jesus Lizard.”
Maybe that’s reaching; not by as much as you might think. “An extended fit of pique” is the phrase that springs to mind. A logic governed the writing of these songs — songs vibrating with so much stark anger that they’re nearly incoherent and at risk of rattling to pieces before they can conclude, which may help explain why Rapeman wouldn’t last long. Neither hardcore nor funk nor thrash, it has hips nonetheless even if Albini’s screeds are largely indecipherable. (Trust me, you don’t really wanna Google the lyrics to “Up Beat”.)
Released earlier the same year, the exceptional, arresting Budd EP could be the work of a completely different band. Restrained and thoughtfully composed, building to emotional crescendoes and vocally legible – even when those vocals feature Albini yelling “superpussy” over and over again like Blues Explosion leader Jon Spencer after shambling drunk out of a time machine – it wants to be embraced. Albini, Wesham and bassist David Wm. Sims might not have been together long enough to cement an identity — and Rapeman might be for you if you have a hard time making big decisions, prefer head banging to dancing, and are obsessed with obscure late 80s underground rock.
But what if Budd walked so Shellac could run? Albini was joined in this trio — which ran, with extended breaks, from 1992 until this month — by Rifle Sport drummer Todd Trainer and Volcano Suns bassist Bob Weston. I won’t bury the lede here: Shellac is hands down my favorite Albini, and it isn’t even close. (1994 debut At Action Park was the first full-length CD I ever bought, because there wasn’t a cassette version.)
Their forte is (was) a sort of prankish math rock, sometimes preeningly aggressive, sometimes contemplatively monotonous, always precise and saber-sharp. His playing here, hypnotic and measured, had reached a peak of confidence, he’d found the perfect foils, and the sneering rage of youth had yielded with time to the withering hauteur of middle age, the spiteful disappointments that crowd the horizon when suddenly there’s less of it waiting ahead. A harshness still permeated many of Albini’s sentiments, but one less fundamentally nihilistic and now softened by the deepening of his voice, and his newfound lack of interest in straining it.
The songs fans remember most are the monolithic album openers: the desperate, prescient “The End of Radio” from 2007’s Excellent Italian Greyhound, the slippery, long-game playing “Didn’t We Deserve A Look At You The Way You Really Are” from 1998’s Terraform, the spiteful “Prayer to God” from 2000’s 1000 Hurts. But the Shellac catalogue is lousy with backbench wonders: the surrealist temporal chuckles “A Minute” and “New Number Order”, the pogoing, almost crooned “Copper”, or the blues-punk strut-crunch of “All The Surveyors”.
With Shellac, Albini was more comfortable in his own skin, and knew who he was: A dad-joke teller who was never a dad, but was aging gradually away from misanthropy, who knew how and where every note needed to land for his songs to achieve maximum impact. And he was making music for anyone trying, valiantly if hesitantly, to figure out how best to live.
- Choose Your Steve Albini - May 10, 2024
- Tower of Glower: On Sonic Youth’s Walls Have Ears - February 16, 2024
- Marc Masters’ Excellent Cassette Adventure - November 30, 2023
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