Three weeks ago, there was a 14-year-old boy in this house wondering why I was blasting Big Black’s ‘Kerosene’ at full volume.
In as much as 14-year-old boys wonder much of anything about their parents’ musical tastes, he might – had he not swiftly taken himself off to a different room – have wondered exactly what I find so fascinating about the song’s broken glass intro.
But Son2 was spared from me telling him about the time the teenage me played ‘Kerosene’ for my best friend and was astounded when he didn’t think its introduction one of the most thrilling uses on the electric guitar.
The reason my youngest son may or may not have heard my music was that Steve Albini, the founder of Big Black and Shellac, had died aged just 61.
Most deaths are unexpected, but his really shocked me. Perhaps because he was someone so active I couldn’t imagine him dying, an image bolstered by the toughness of the music he made.
I was listening through iTunes* then, but on the eve of the release of Shellac’s latest album To All Trains, the catalogues of that band and Big Black returned to Spotify.**
‘Kerosene’ was far from the only standout Big Black track to blast off with his ‘rocket guitar’, Santiago Durango’s ‘train guitar’ and the pounding combination of Dave Riley’s bass and drum machine Roland’s mechanised yet lurching beats. Add to that the music he with Shellac bassist Bob Weston and drummer Todd Trainer and it’s quite the noise-rock oeuvre.
Nevertheless, it was Albini’s engineering/recording work on Nirvana’s In Utero that guaranteed coverage in everything from NBC to The Daily Mail and even the London Evening Standard, articles that might have added mentions of his recording duties on influential albums Pixies Surfer Rosa or PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me.
As much as those 80s/90s albums were high points for the artists concerned, it was Albini’s decades of tireless studio work, as well as his various band activities, that rendered him the Kevin Bacon of the punk rock and indie world. Except that recording a couple of bands a week on average for three decades or so probably gave him less than Bacon’s reputed six degrees of separation from the punk and indie rock world.
Certainly, if your use of social media is anything like mine, the news of his sudden passing from a heart attack in his Electrical Audio Recording studio will have been all over your feeds for the past few weeks and still the tributes come. Posts that reflect on the respect and affection for the straight-talking, and sometimes curmudgeonly, Albini.
That was apparent from bands who’d known him for decades, bands he disagreed with, bands he worked with – whether in 2024 or years past, and bands that wished they had worked with him. Already you could fill a magazine with the tributes. Soon it’ll be a book.
Beyond his obvious talent for recording – and poker and food writing, the same humanity that produced his charity work helping families facing urgent financial hardship with Letters to Santa shines through.
Learning that over the years Letters to Santa distributed over a million dollars help families move to better housing and safer living conditions, solve health crises, relocate and reunite family members, and otherwise stabilise precarious lives is humbling.
Then of course the suddenness of his passing came just days before Shellac’s latest album arrived and just as the promotional cycle for To All Trains kicked in. The lead time on publishing being what it is, interviews timed to coincide with the release of To All Trains were pushed up the schedule, seemingly giving him voice from beyond the grave.
For Stereogum's We've Got a File on You series, he gave a potted history of some of his career highlights, including working on The Stooges’ 2007 album The Weirdness.
“I got to hang out with Iggy Pop for a month, and it was f*cking awesome. It was exactly like, ‘What would you like Iggy Pop to be like?’ ‘Well, for a start: shirtless. And then incredibly bawdy and dancing and clapping nonstop.’ ‘Oh, yeah, okay, no problem. That’s what you’ll get’.”
Another of the interviews given in his final months was one for a cover story for The Wire, copies of which went on sale the day Albini passed away. The magazine’s also put online the full transcript from that story’s Zoom interview, so unedited that it begins with Albini telling Bob Weston he’s on mute. The Wire additionally took down the paywall on its April 1994 ‘Invisible Jukebox’ feature that sees Albini played, sight unseen, a selection of records and comment on them.
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It’s not the only piece from the past to come back into wider circulation. Inevitably, another is his 1993 essay aimed at bands contemplating signing to a major label in the post-Nirvana gold rush ‘The Problem with Music’. Short version, and its memorable closing line: “Some of your friends are probably already this f*cked.”
Albini’s moves to own his past of contentious comments and decisions re-entered the discourse too (“I’m overdue for a conversation about my role in inspiring ‘edgelord’ sh*t,” as he put it on Twitter, before exploring it in more detail with Mel magazine a couple of years ago).
Meantime the new album, Shellac's first in 10 years, is a brilliant slice of noise rock, filled with scabrous lyrics, wire-taut guitar, humour, and rock-solid rhythms (yes, the drums sound fantastic). It’s trite to say To All Trains is a fitting epitaph for Albini, but it’s another of his bands going out at the height of their powers, just not on their own terms like Big Black did.
To All Trains was recorded a few years before its release and then held over while Covid settled and the band worked to get everything just right – including the cover art of Bob Weston’s photograph inside Union Station in Chicago. Despite knowing this, there’s still a tendency to analyse its lyrics in the wake of Albini’s death and the closing “I Don’t Fear Hell” takes on an extra, eery weight:
“Something, something, something, when this is over / I’ll leap in my grave like the arms of a lover
“If there’s a heaven, I hope they’re having fun / ‘Cause if there’s a hell I’m gonna know everyone”
Me? After the new Shellac album I’ll be once again blasting The Rich Man’s Eight Track Tape, which I picked up in Liverpool in January to replace my cassette copy of Atomizer. I originally bought the album some 30 years ago from Piccadilly Records in Manchester on a visit to the city to check out the university.
I remember nothing about the academic institution, but the subsequent thrill of hearing Albuni’s much-written-about sound for the first time on my drive home still stay with me forever.
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* I’m aware of the irony of this. The back cover of Songs About f*cking is clearly sets out Albini’s long-held views on the matter (“the future belongs to the analog loyalists. f*ck digital”***)
** I’m aware of the irony of this too.
*** Given that CD copies of Songs About f*cking include Big Black’s Cheap Trick cover of ‘He’s a whor*’ as a bonus track, and that The Rich Man’s Eight Track Tape is a cool package of Atomizer, the ‘Heartbeat’ singleandHeadacheEP, Albini only ever wanted to f*ck with and not f*ck over digital fans
