Man’s gotta have something to hate, guess I’ll do

Big Black: Songs About Fucking

Songs About Fucking. A blunt, uncompromising title for a blunt, uncompromising album. This is a Steve Albini album, yes, in fact it is arguably the Steve Albini album, the one that most fully encompasses his malfeasance. The guitars have a horrible, diseased sound, like razor wire pulled across sewer pipes (the Albini guitar sound) in a blistered, scorched atmosphere. This is uneasily accessible ugliness. In a career of directness, “Bad Penny” strikes me as Albini’s most in-your-face statement of views – ‘Don’t curse me for my nature, don’t bless me for my wrongs, I’m just a bad penny.’ Neither condemn nor celebrate the dark, nasty things in life, but accept their necessary presence.

Of course, this is all about the dark end of the street of human existence at the ass end of the rotten and mentally disordered twentieth century. Horrors like being awakened from a coma after decades and finding yourself terribly aged with your entire life stolen from you, people being executed by slashing their throat and pulling their tongue out through the hole, fungal bread poisoning, mafia car-bombings, the true story about a sociopath raping and murdering a girl who wouldn’t go out with his brother, all without judgment and all about as musically abrasive as Metal Machine Music. The sound is all those scrawling barbed-wire guitar parts over punishing pneumatic beats and sometimes, for instance on “Ergot” like the instruments are being less played and more stomped to pieces.

While sex only figures into a couple songs, the title is apt. This is music of brutality and ugly honesty. Even the cover songs (Kraftwerk’s synthpop ground zero “The Model” low-slung and hideous, and Cheap Trick’s “He’s a Whore” skullfucked to death) are boot-stamped Albini songs, just brutal hatefucking hellfire. It’s like being trepanned with an icepick and a clawhammer.

79% => ****

check out this excellent live video of “Bad Penny” on Youtube

note: This is meant to be heard on vinyl, and when I get around to getting a record player, this will be one to get. For now, I own it on CD, but I did buy it for three dollars at a pawnshop.

Advantage: Jared

Jared – 2
Pawnshop – 0

~ by jshopa on May 10, 2008.