For two LPs and a handful of singles, The Wedding Present had cultivated a tidy body of work that was marked by Dave Gedge’s lyrical preoccupations with the vexing intricacies of intimacy, as buoyed by a maniacally jangley electric guitar.
Cut to 1990, wherein Gedge incongruously recruits Steve Albini, fresh off of working with considerably noisier bands like Boss Hog, The Jesus Lizard and Pigface, to helm an EP, swapping the Wedding Present’s previous palette of bright primary colors with inky dark smudges that didn't stay inside the lines. Then came the full album.
Providing a forceful, sonic heft to the band’s overall aesthetic, Albini’s fabled warts’n’all recording style swiftly jettisoned the cute, indie tweeness of The Wedding Present’s previous work with a thick, bulbous sound that was roughly hewn and endearingly unwieldy. From the pit-like dance floor of New York City’s own CBGB, my friend Rob Bala and I heard Dave Gedge step up to the mic to explain the title of the new record and the songs thereupon. “It’s called Seamonsters,” deadpanned Gedge. “because they’re big and scary!”
True enough. The indie jangles had been replaced by driving, uncooperative guitars, pugnacious basslines, migraine-friendly drums and eardrum-ravaging lashings of flat-out noise terror that transformed Gedge’s songs from aw-shucks ditties about star-crossed crushes into howling exhortations of unreciprocated adoration and bitter betrayal.
Needless to say, that was all Steve Albini.
Yes, yes, yes… he went on to record In Utero by Nirvana, but … that’s almost inconsequential compared to everything he did prior to and beyond that.
He wasn’t always pleasant, much less polite. Hell, he positively *excelled* at being abrasively tasteless. Sharp of wit and even sharper of tongue, Steve Albini said quite a lot of flatly objectionable shit, in his day. A lot of folks overlooked that because of the truly unique and combustible majesty of the sound he created with bands like Big Black, Shellac and some other outfits whose monikers might land one in Facebook jail for posting. But his reputation for brute-force candor that came coated in a veritable fondue of eloquent cruelty preceded him, and usually not in a nice way.
I first heard Big Black in college (my first taste being Albini’s merciless manhandling of Cheap Trick’s “He’s a Whore”), and it immediately left an impression. To my bruised ears, the truly great musicians aren’t necessarily classically trained, conventionally adept or saddled with “chops” so much as they simply have a readily identifiable style. The nanosecond you hear a piece of music Steve Albini was involved in, you know it, and there is no other sound quite like it. Big Black may have looked like a hapless trio of gormlessly bespectacled nerds, but they created a roar more ferocious than any burly metal band you can name. In the recording studio, music overseen by Albini (he rejected the title “producer”) took on a sinewy bluntness that could *only* have come from his helming of the console.
I was going to keep waxing hyperbolic about albums like the heroically indelicate Songs About Fucking or Shellac’s 1000 Hurts, but my friend Anthony Cohan-Miccio beautifully addressed the issues I alluded to in the first graph on Facebook so well that I thought I should share the whole damn thing below.
Rest in peace, Steve Albini
Beyond the shock of his age and productivity - a damn week or so before the first Shellac album in a decade! What in the Roy Orbison shit is that?! - I think the reason Steve Albini dying is hitting me harder than I would have expected is how much I admired the way he engaged with the asinine, needlessly cruel, hateful shit he got up to in his past (you can’t even say “youth” unless you use GW Bush logic). He owned it, and made the effort to explicate it without excusing it. He didn’t just apologize, but acknowledged he’d gotten off easy. As someone whose sense of honesty & humor has collided with ignorance & privilege to a humiliating degree as well, I really appreciated the all too rare example of being MORE committed to honesty, humility & evolution than just ego preservation & income. I’m going to spend today hearing a lot of exquisite room mic work he achieved, and there will be plenty of memorials going into the remarkable bodies of work he created and helped others create. but, as just a rando fan, my deepest grief is knowing a guy who believed in growing, and never wanted to stop sharing what he learned along the way, isn’t going to get to anymore.
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