No Platonic ideal, the Shellacs were interested in the sardonic ideal. Last Friday the trio released To All Trains, his sixth and last work, in every sense since it was released after the death of Steve Albini. Contains a beautifully cheeky piece titled Chick New Wave where Albini sings that he's done “with music made by males, now I'm only interested in new wave made by chicks.” And obviously he says it as if his band wasn't made up of three men, as if the group's previous album wasn't titled Dude Incredibleas if a girl, any girl today would let him call her a chick.
Pushing oneself to the limit, after all, has always been Albini's specialty, even if in more recent times it has taken a step back. With Big Black he sang about bored arsonists setting themselves on fire and released an album entitled Songs About Fucking (is there a need for translation?). In comparison, Prayer to Godthe song from Shellac's third album 1000 Hurts in which he asked God to painfully kill the man who had stolen his woman (and to destroy her too, but without inflicting suffering on her) was light stuff.
And so when it came out ten years ago Dude Incredible the trio seemed interested in having fun, but with an added touch of irony. Even Albini's attitude has changed in the last five years, when he began to deal with the provocations of the past. He therefore turned to sarcasm and dark humor, avoiding hurting people's feelings. Here, this is the type of lightness that is found in To All Trains.
You can almost see Albini and singer-bassist Bob Weston singing most of the songs with a smirk on their lips. For example, there is one entitled How I Wrote How I Wrote 'Elastic Man' (Cock & Bull) which makes fun of the Fall song from 1979 which in turn made fun of a 1939 comic. Then there are Scabby the Rata Wipers-esque ode to the unlikely icon of American labor unions, and the line “I aspire to bronze, but I'll settle for lead” in the opening number Wsod, a sort of parody of stadium rock. Hey, Albini and Weston even high-five each other Girl From Outside and these are certainly not two high-five guys.
Perhaps the taste for mockery serves to measure our level of knowledge of Shellac, who have always moved in the no man's land that separates art rock from its parody. We are talking about a musician, Albini and perhaps also his companions, who was influenced in equal measure by the Fall and Cheap Trick, and who on stage could seem like a kind of Lenny Bruce.
To All Trains it therefore stands on the border between the serious and the facetious, which is the field in which Shellac have always operated. At 28 minutes it is shorter and funnier than an episode of Young Sheldon and it sounds great, even if you listen to it with headphones connected via Bluetooth to your smartphone – ok, Albini wouldn't have liked this, but hey, he was the one who recorded and mastered the album in a way that would sound good even listening to it in headphones worse conditions. The rhythms are formidable, drummer Todd Trainer is a powerhouse throughout the album and there's even a kind of swinging blues, Scrappers, which looks like it came out of a junkyard. And yes, it's a blast.
There is only one moment in which irony sounds strange and it is in the song that closes the album, I Don't Fear Hell. Albini sings “I will throw myself into the grave as one would throw oneself into the arms of a lover” and “if heaven exists, I hope they are having fun, because if hell exists, I will meet everyone”. The music runs and then crashes on itself as if it were a splendid sound storm, but hearing Albini sing those words a few days after his death is something cruel. And yet if there is someone who has always stayed away from sentimentality (as this and all the other Shellac songs demonstrate), it is Albini. So To All Trains It may not be Shellac's definitive statement, that's what they had every time they went on stage, but with its bellicose lyrics and remarkable sound it's a fine example of the Albinian ideal.
From Rolling Stone US.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
