Band: Shellac
Album: Terraform
Best song: “House Full of Garbage” is great for its changes and length. “Didn’t We Deserve a Look at You the Way You Really Are” is great. “This is a Picture” and “Copper” are great, great, hard quick rock shots.
Worst song: “Rush Job” might be the lowlight, but the record really works as a whole.
It’s hard to recount all the reasons that Steve Albini is a curmudgeonly jackass, though Pitchfork recently snarkily gave an account here. Needless to say, I love him and hate him equally for his Ted Rall-esque polemics. I appreciate that Albini has convictions and I love said convictions. His rants against the music industry are legendary and not far off the proverbial mark. His need to fight for his beloved records gets my admiration.
But, Albini’s rants against digital media, while likely grounded in good faith, don’t really win anyone over to that side.
The key is that the man is a wildly interesting person, both as indie rock philosopher and as a musician. Big Black’s sound is easy to dismiss as less than other bands of the time, but Sounds For Lovers About Fucking is a brilliant piece of music. Shellac, featuring Brick Layer Cake’s Todd Trainer and super-producer/ex-Volcano Sun Bob Weston, is the picture of Albini’s further extension into analog-ness. The band uses little compression, basically no digital junk and seemingly doesn’t release its music digitally.
On the band’s second record, Shellac dances between super long concept pieces and short, quick bursts of powerful, exquisite math rock. In the middle of the album falls “Mouthpiece,” the only song that could’ve fit perfectly on At Action Park, the band’s debut. But, around it, songs like “Canada” are quick and tell a minor, easy story (in the case of “Canada,” a partial stripping-down of the indie community). Like his work in Big Black, Albini examines misanthropic, obnoxious characters (autobiographical!) lyrically, with a guitar sound that best resembles a buzzsaw.
The album’s best song, “This is a Picture,” is a desperate plea for sadness (“This is a picture of things going a little out of hand/This is a sculpture of a couple of things we’ve got to get straight.”), with the lyrics calling out for a heaven by the song’s short (2:30) timeframe. It’s decidedly tender for Albini, despite its fury.
The two long form pieces — “Didn’t We Deserve a Look at You the Way You Really Are” and “House Full of Garbage” — are more of a picture of why Shellac works so well. Each member uses his repetitive piece to emphasize a point. “Didn’t We Deserve a Look at You the Way You Really Are” is the opus, beginning the album with more than 12 minutes of “fuck you” lyrics, snarling guitars and a steady Trainer beat. Almost Daft Punk-esque in its repetition, Bob Weston’s bass line keeps the song going while Albini’s guitar moves in and out to tell the story. Trainer falls between Neil Peart precision in small fills and a Roland-esque steadiness. The record is, in many ways, a very Albini-esque experiment in repetition and slight movements. It is nothing if not rewarding.
“House Full of Garbage” is more classically Big Black-like in its misanthropy. The song retells the story of a man — presumably a hoarder — who has built “a monument to himself.” This monument, of course, is his completely destroyed life, eventually mentioning, well…
Passed a boy asleep in a tent outside.
Why?
Imagine his wife asleep in they bed.
The times they make love and…
With the doodoo and the feces on the wall.
Lyrics, man.
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It’s hard to think of Albini as a real person; he seems too often to be a simple caricature of what people think of indie rock dickheads. he’s Indie Rock Pete times 10.
But, Terraform shows that Albini is a guitar player and songwriter with a real view, a real sound and something interesting to say. Backed with Trainer and Weston, he makes a great record.
And certainly, his guitar sound is legendary.
