Shellac
Excellent Italian Greyhound

For two days I've let Steve Albini and Co. hit me hard in the ears.

Before listening to the album, I waited a bit for the childish pleasure of delaying the moment when gifts are unwrapped, and a bit for the fear that instead of a confirmation I would face a disappointment. Yet, Shellac's records are bought sight unseen: Steve Albini is one of the few who has stripped away all unnecessary frills from the music he makes and the way he spreads it. He, Todd Trainer (drums), and Bob Weston (bass) take the necessary time, let the songs grow in their rare live shows, do their jobs as producers and sound engineers, and seven years after releasing a masterpiece, they release another one, and if they had done it two years ago or in five years, it would have been the same.

The expressive urgency of the three, their fury, the mathematical rigor (always on the verge of breaking) of their pieces, remain the same. The album opens with "The End of Radio", where Albini, the last DJ (and last man?) on the face of the earth, conducts the farewell broadcast to an audience that no longer exists, in a long and hypnotic goodbye punctuated by the phrase "Can you hear me now?" shouted with increasing violence. The second track ("Steady as She Goes") is punkier, faster, and more violent. With the third track, Albini and co.’s experiments begin: How long can you promise a listener to give them a break or an opening, to end a riff, to start a song and not do it? How much silence can you insert into a song at the center of an album? These are some of the questions this record tries to answer; "Be Prepared" plays with the listener like a cat with a mouse, making them wait for the moment when guitar and drums will unleash, and they keep waiting as long as the game can hold, "Genuine Lulabelle" in its nine minutes and seventeen seconds (ending with a strange Italian insert…) includes a long monologue and crooner fragment from a dazed Albini exploring the boundaries of how unpleasant one can be in a song and will appeal to few, and even those who appreciate it will not listen to it too often.
"Kittypants" and "Paco" are two excellent instrumentals that add nothing to Shellac's history, "Boycott" seems an innocuous punk piece but in its two minutes reserves more than one surprise. "Spoke", violent, screamed, and very fast, is opened by a sort of advertising jingle: could it be the last song broadcast by DJ Albini to a now-defunct humanity?

A beautiful, angry, and unpleasant album, that immediately gets under your skin and doesn't leave the listener's battered ears, with sounds and perfect overlaps but always on the brink of madness and disorder, dissonance and silence. The highest marks.

(Even for the cover, regardless of what they say...)