Shellac
At Action Park
»
Shellac
At Action Park
Touch & Go, 1994
RiYL: Jesus Lizard, Unsane, Rodan, Don Caballero, Slint |
Albini returned to his own music in 1994, forming Shellac with ex-Rifle Sport drummer Todd Trainer and ex-Volcano Suns bassist Bob Weston. The "Uranus" and "Rough Gesture" singles served as preludes to the band's debut album At Action Park.
For anyone who had forgotten the abrasive, catastrophic sound of Big Black -- the true progenitors of today's noise-rock -- all it will take is the dissonant guitar attack of "My Black Ass" to put you back in your place. For a dozen seconds, Albini grinds his guitar like a butcher without pity, creating a seismic, end-of-the-world shake. The album's tone is pretty much set right here, alternately anguished, punished and on the verge of continuous collapse. Another matter altogether is the instrumental "Pull The Cup", which exudes sour, linear riffing, recalling a bit of prog-rock with a melodic theme that appears on the surface from Albini's graceless movements. "A Minute," a badly camouflaged boogie, compresses all the energy of these three rock terrorists into a more accessable format.
It is Albini's skill as a "director" that bestows Shellac's music its proliferation of pathos. On "Crow", after a long phase of suspense created by Trainer's insane, tribal drumming, the guitar lashes out, creating an irresistible crescendo. Seconds later a minimalistic coda explodes in a cluster of chords and terrifying screams. Digging between the pauses, where on songs like "Dog And Pony Show" the sound is almost cubist, all one can find are messy accumulations of musical fragments. In this way Albini is able to construct mental states that border on hallucinatory.
And what of the recitation-style vocal on "The Concept Of North?" Doesn't it belong perhaps more to the world of theater than to music? I wouldn't be surprised if Albini one day writes an opera. A feeble, obsessive strumming bordering on samba and funk introduces the monotonous riff that accompanies the delirium of "Song Of The Minerals": one octave lower, a rhythm slightly more orderly, and we would be in Pere Ubu territory, testifying to rock's undeniable genealogical heritage.
At Action Park closes with another largely instrumental song, "Il Porno Star." This time it's a little more abstract, and worthy of jamming more creative than what's normally tried in rock circles. It's this passage that removes the last doubts: Albini's new sound is far from the claustrophobic atmospheres of Big Black and Rapeman. It's more in line with what, at the time, was the new generation of noise-rock purveyors, the Unsanes, the Don Cabelleros, that "do noise" and "do it loudly." The trio offers spectacular performances, amusing itself with plenty of acrobatic jamming, with harmonies more and more colossal, with chords more and more apocalyptic. It's very much an important album in the context of the '90s post-rock explosion.
All deafening, decomposed, impossible to measure and deliberate even at its slightest moments, At Action Park obscures Albini's personality behind a curtain of absolute black. He's perhaps the only rock musician that could make sense of modern reality -- not the ethereal one, or the metaphysical one of the Greek philosophers, but the perverse world colored with our grim anxieties.
PIERO SCARUFFI | Piero Scaruffi runs the exhaustive music database Scaruffi.com. A native of Italy, he has also been praised for his work on the General Theory of Relativity, formal theories of the mind, and artificial intelligence. And no, we aren't making that up.