Shellac: The End of Radio (original) (raw)

Steve Albini’s convictions about music production and distribution paint him as nearly a mythic figure in the already esoteric world of analog audio engineering. But underneath his impenetrable, iconoclastic facade, Albini practices a sort of radical humility, charging market rate for his engineering services and constantly taking chances on obscure, burgeoning groups in his Electrical Audio studios. This approach to the industry likely came from the rapacious work ethic of the late John Peel: “He listened religiously to every single record he received in the mail, devoting hours of every day to the task,” Albini once noted of the British DJ. Coming from the man whose screeds against popular music make it onto massive billboards, the comment practically reads like hero worship.

And the admiration was apparently mutual—when Peel was asked to list his top 20 albums of all time, he placed Albini’s first band Big Black’s Songs About Fucking at 15. And there is a palpable level of trust in these recordings, collected and newly reissued on a double LP. With only an unofficial EP to their name at the time, Albini’s new band Shellac kicked off their 1994 session at the BBC’s Maida Vale studios with “Spoke,” a track that wouldn’t appear fully formed for another 13 years. After Albini’s screeching directive—”Radio 1, play the drums!”—drummer Todd Trainer plays a straight-ahead rock groove and bassist Bob Weston opens with a thick, chugging bassline. Then, as if to poke fun at the inscrutability of his absurdist, often violent lyricism, Albini and Weston exchange some indecipherable gibberish, sounding like an unhinged political debate. Within 15 seconds, the entire dynamic of Shellac is fully formed in real time, months before they’d put out their debut LP.

Playing live is a quintessential element of Shellac’s legacy; bootlegged copies of live performances circulate among fans, desperate to hear unreleased material or even riffs on studio versions of tracks (the Peel sessions themselves have been circulating in a lower quality since their broadcasts). Albini has said that the band improvises “40 percent” of their material in any given performance. “Canada,” recorded in the 1994 session and again in 2004, manifests these changes as a kind of loosening of their proverbial neckties. There‘s a hypnotic melodicism in Albini’s singing, but where the 1994 version is all business, wound tightly around the rhythmic crunch of Weston’s low bass, the 2004 version features the band singing the theme song from the Canadian SCTV sketch “Great White North,” as they’ve done live, and a markedly slower pacing to the tinny riffs that lurch the song forward.