The old five-point scale has been retired in favor of just rating stuff 1-10, which allows me a much more nuanced final rating. Still don't take it that seriously. Most of these come from my own collection, so the grades skew rather high. Your results may vary if you send me stuff to review.
Each album is given three Essential tracks, my personal favorites, regardless of how weird and inconsequential they are. The Quintessential pick is the one I think best represents the album as a whole, so you can try one song instead of a whole album of songs. Non-Essential picks range from merely disappointing to outright unlistenable.
Vantablack industrial punk.
(This is an album that was previously covered on the Rediscovering! Click the link in the table to read my first impressions, or read on for how they might have changed.)
Let's talk "Jordan, Minnesota". Musically, this is Big Black in top form, a repetitive blast of simulated backbeat drumming and industrial guitars that ends in Steve's out of breath screeches--playacting as one of the child rape victims in the Jordan abuse ring scandal. Contrary to popular belief, there were very credible cases of actual molestation that came out of the reports, only torpedoed by an overzealous prosecutor willing to harass kids and encourage salacious testimony. Steve would apologize for this song perpetuating the "falsehood" in time, but even if it was all fake, does that make this any less tacky? It's one thing when Big Black explores taboos in a fictional light. When it's real people involved and done this way, it goes beyond harrowing and simply becomes questionably edgy, absolutely a shame given the intense musical backing.
If you can get past that fucking bleak shadow, though, Atomizer is a blue-hot cracking listen, more so for its sounds than its memorable songs. Big Black took the already repellant napalm punk music they'd been cooking up on their EPs and came up with a batch of somehow even nastier sounds to augment their questionable lyrical preoccupations. "Kerosene" is a six minute odyssey of ringing guitars turning into blowtorches, extolling the virtues of sex and arson combined--and it may be their best song period. "Fists of Love" turns especially aggressive sex atmospheric, and "Bazooka Joe" even features an Albini vocal solo, albeit one encouraging a traumatized war vet to become a contract killer. Appalling lyrical matter, buzzsaw guitars, and drum machine stampedes are the Big Black recipe, and Atomizer about shows the fullest extents those things can get taken, for better and absolutely for worse.
(Atomizer would be reissued on CD as The Rich Man's Eight Track Tape alongside the Heartbeat and Headache singles in 1987. Too short to get their own reviews, Heartbeat features a gnarly cover of the Wire song that handily proves Big Black didn't need nasty lyrics to sound intense alongside two half-baked originals. Headache is largely a sonic retread of earlier material that signalled that Big Black's star was burning out, leading to one more full-length before they disbanded forever. I always thought that was the right move, but having listened through their discography now, I can confidently say that was the right move.)
| Essential: | Quintessential: | Non-Essential: | Rating: |
|---|---|---|---|
| "Big Money", "Kerosene", "Bazooka Joe" | "Passing Complexion" | "Jordan, Minnesota" |  |
| The Rich Man's Eight Track Tape's Rediscovering entry | |||
Obstinate, ostentatious, funky? Huh.
It's really a three-way toss-up between "Cables"' sheet metal ambience, "Racer-X"'s throbbing bass and drum machine bombast, and "Jordan, Minnesota"'s harrowing wails for Big Black's most intense first minute. I may still give it to "Racer-X". Skeletal and stabbing, Steve's vocals about how fuckin' cool Rex from Speed Racer really is mixed way down low, it's about as monolithic as anything the band has ever done. If Racer-X isn't as uniformly electrifying as Bulldozer (mostly it sounds a bit dull in the mix), it's still damn good, and a useful document of their continued development as a band in sound, approach, and their appreciation for making a classic song Bigger and Blacker.
There's a sorta kinetic funk energy to Big Black's galvanized sound this time around, as they make the drum machine swing on "Deep Six" and call-and-response their glass shard guitars on "Sleep!". Roland 1.0 (a TR-606) is replaced by Roland 2.0 (an E-Mu Drumulator a la "Shout"), and that's just plain an upgrade, if I'm honest. Lyrically, Big Black still deal in depravity as handily as before, whether that's through portraying a shittalking scumbag trucker who refers to himself as "God's gift to women", accusing the English of incest, or covering a James Brown tune. Hey, how would you end this thing off?
| Essential: | Quintessential: | Non-Essential: | Rating: |
|---|---|---|---|
| "Racer-X", "The Ugly American", "Sleep!" | "Deep Six" | "The Big Payback" |  |
| Download from Big Black's Bandcamp | |||
Thrillingly repellant.
The trebly, ripping, clanging guitar intro to "Cables" says everything about Bulldozer in just thirty seconds. Disinterested in common taste but especially interested in violence, it's like Steve Albini just discovered how to make his guitar sound like that shortly before they pressed record. Emboldened after the effective home demo Lungs attracted a proper band (Steve is backed by most of Naked Raygun and, curiously, Urge Overkill's drummer Pat Byrne doubling Roland the drum machine), Bulldozer isn't just notable for establishing Big Black's entire musical MO, but for how damn well they were carrying it out out of the gate.
Over a spiky, thrashing backdrop of sheet metal guitars and unrelenting percussion, Steve delights in using his snotty, nerdy shrieks to embody and satirize the shitbirds and shitheels that center his songs. Two thrillseekers trespass in a slaughterhouse on "Cables". "Pigeon Kill" pitches a tent at an entire town's poisoned corn bird genocide. If Seth the attack dog isn't racist enough for you, try the sampled America First Committee message at the start of the track. Even the closing Lungs outtake "Jump the Climb" is a step up in aggression, despite it sharing Lungs' ineffectual lyrical vagueness. Compellingly confrontational right out of the gate, with the occasional cowpunk groove here and there for good measure, Bulldozer set a high bar for the young punk band to clear--and only occasionally did they do so.
| Essential: | Quintessential: | Non-Essential: | Rating: |
|---|---|---|---|
| "Cables", "Texas", "Seth" | "Pigeon Kill" | "I'm a Mess" |  |
| Download from Big Black's Bandcamp | |||
Prime Big Black? No. Primal Big Black? Absolutely.
You probably know Steve Albini more for his "don't call me a producer" production work than his musical output, but neither are to be taken for granted. Albini's first band, Big Black, booked their own shows, sung about raping kids, made drum machines sound fucking scary again, and exposed a new generation of musicians to punk's promise of total DIY freedom. Once Steve pulled a band together on the subsequent Bulldozer EP, Big Black burned white hot, but the beginning of their story started much differently, with an angry loser out of Montana, a Roland TR-606, and a 4-track.
It's easy to dismiss Lungs. Albini really can't muster the "yes, I speak from experience when I scream about kicking a girl's head in" fury of prime Big Black, and the guitars are pretty anemic. What Lungs lacks in overt aggression, though, it makes up for in stark isolation. The drum machine, Big Black's trademark, still pounds here, the heart and ribcage around the monologue about creepy-crawlies on "Steelworker". Albini sounds like he's on death's doorstep on "The Crack", and Rip" (not "RIP", you monkeys) is a great graveyard-punk track. The sound quality is excellent too--for a home recording from the early 80s, you really can't complain. I'm biased, given how Lungs influenced my own high school noise escapades, but I do think there's something to this, even if it's just crack fumes.
(Addendum: I highly recommend getting this one on vinyl if you dig it. What sounds a bit flat on my digital copy fucking tears out of the speakers on vinyl. Well worth it.)
| Essential: | Quintessential: | Non-Essential: | Rating: |
|---|---|---|---|
| "Live in a Hole", "The Crack", "Rip" | "Steelworker" | "Dead Billy" | |
| Download from Big Black's Bandcamp | |||
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