You don’t just hear a Steve Albini drum recording; you endure it. Perhaps while wincing.
To choose one of dozens of possible examples, cue up “Pull the Cup,” the second track from At Action Park, the 1994 debut by Shellac. Albini was a member of the band himself, but beyond the sonic barbed wire he wrung out of his Travis Bean TB500, and his occasional clenched yelp into the mic, he also blessed the offbeat post-hardcore trio — and particularly drummer extraordinaire Todd Trainer — with what discerning rock fans worldwide already revered as the signature Albini Sound. Around 22 seconds into the song, when Trainer begins shadowing Albini’s syncopated riff with a stark kick-and-snare figure, the Morse code succession of thud-thud-crack, thud-crack rings out with overwhelming clarity and force, simultaneously stinging the ears and centering the mind.
Wherever you first encountered this drum sound — likely on defining, often-deafening late-’80s and early-’90s underground-rock statements including Pixies’ Surfer Rosa, the Jesus Lizard’s Goat and PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me or, later, most famously, Nirvana’s In Utero — you came to crave its stripped-to-the-bone austerity as one might a regular dip in a cold plunge: a much-needed corrective jolt, an antidote to the processed fluff flowing freely from every radio or speaker in earshot.
When assessing the legacy of Albini, who died Tuesday of a heart attack at age 61, it seems useful to think of this sonic fingerprint as a microcosm for his entire worldview. Whether you were letting an Albini-recorded snare drum pummel your skull, savoring the power-drill-meets-jackhammer cacophony of his breakthrough band Big Black, perusing one of his legendarily acerbic yet generally spot-on treatises on the failings of the commercial music industry or even listening to him play the witty raconteur while recalling, say, his latest World Series of Poker triumph, you were essentially receiving the same message in different forms: Stake out your territory, stand your ground and, for the love of God, would you please cut the shit?
Albini’s journey from noise-rock upstart to subcultural icon began in mid-’70s Montana. As a maladjusted teenager in Missoula, he found crucial solace in the Ramones, the Stooges and other early punk touchstones. “The greatest thing about punk rock for me, as an outsider, was that the concept that you had to be allowed in was no longer valid,” he said in Our Band Could Be Your Life, Michael Azerrad’s crucial chronicle of the 1980s American rock underground. “You could be operating in a vacuum, you could be as fucked up an individual as you cared to be, and if you did something of worth, all these external conditions were immaterial.”
Albini tested that ethos when he moved to the Chicago suburb of Evanston to attend Northwestern University as a journalism major, with a minor in fine art. One of his early efforts there was a performance piece in which he, as Azerrad describes it, “planned to stand behind a Plexiglas wall and taunt people while inviting them to throw things at him.” The happening came to a swift end when an overzealous friend hurled a bowling pin through the wall, but nevertheless, Albini had established himself as an aspiring provocateur unafraid to stand up to flak, a mission he furthered by publishing unfiltered music-scene hot takes in local zine Matter.
With Big Black — a band that featured both Santiago Durango, guitarist for Albini’s favorite local Chicago punk band, Naked Raygun, and a primitive drum machine nicknamed Roland — Albini showed that he had the aesthetic chops to back up his wise-ass rhetoric. Their magnum opus, 1987’s Songs About Fucking, still scans as one of the crassest and most abrasive records of its era, while also making a strong case for Albini as a brutally effective songwriter in the tradition of his outsider heroes.
During Big Black’s lifespan, Albini started recording bands at home, accelerating when the band broke up midway through ’87. As he would later tell a writer, “All I want to do is, I want to make records that sound realistic and that kick my ass. Everything else is secondary to that.”
The ability to reliably administer a vérité-style ass-kicking turned out to be a hot commodity. Throughout the late ’80s and much of the ’90s, bands flocked to Albini, seeking a piece of that rude magic he captured with breathtaking force on albums by everyone from Seattle scuzz-rockers Tad to future alt-rock heroes the Breeders. (Among the countless more obscure Albini-recorded efforts to see release during these years, the self-titled debut by a brainy and maniacally intense Cleveland band called craw proved life-changing for this writer, a story that surely played out similarly many thousands of times worldwide with various albums he engineered.)
To zero in once again specifically on that legendary drum sound, a staggering array of underground drumming greats basked in its cold, unforgiving light during this golden era: As Rudy Van Gelder was to the likes of Billy Higgins, Art Blakey, Elvin Jones, Tony Williams and Joe Chambers during the 1960s, so was Albini to formidable talents such as Mac McNeilly (The Jesus Lizard), Damon Che (Don Caballero), Jim White (Dirty Three), Britt Walford (Slint, the Breeders) Thymme Jones (Cheer-Accident, Brise-Glace), Blake Fleming (Dazzling Killmen), Neil Chastain (craw), Cheshire Agusta (Stinking Lizaveta), Eito Noro (Zeni Geva), Kevin Shea (Storm & Stress), John Stanier (Helmet, only on one song, but what a song…), Danny Arnold Lommen (Gore) and Chris Farmer (Breadwinner).
Albini in 2014. Photo: Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images.
As the grunge wave crested with Nirvana, and underground acts started becoming major-label superstars overnight, a visit to Albini began, for some, to take on the status of a pilgrimage: Instead of opting for, say, Rick Rubin’s New Age-y vibecraft, a band in search of a respite from music-industry frippery could seek out Albini’s tough love and get back in touch with their core truths. (Albini famously expressed his record-making M.O. in a letter to prospective clients Nirvana, where he outlined his scrupulous aversion to taking royalty points on this or any other project he might work on, and recommended that the band “bang a record out in a couple of days, with high quality but minimal ‘production’ and no interference from the front office bulletheads.”)
“It sounds like the sound of a group in a space and really just natural,” said Dave Grohl last year, reflecting on the appeal of the Albini aesthetic in a joint Conan O’Brien interview tied to the 30th anniversary of In Utero. Recalling his early days in Nirvana, he said of himself and Kurt Cobain, “We had always listened to records that Steve had made,” listing off Albini-helmed classics such as Surfer Rosa, the Breeders’ Pod and an unnamed Jesus Lizard album that was likely the band’s 1990 debut, Head. “And that was just the sound that we loved.”
And, as anyone who has beheld In Utero’s gloriously unruly wallop can attest, that was the sound they got, despite Albini’s open disdain for the business environment that Nirvana was then operating in. “I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit,” he wrote in a now-famous screed against what he saw as the great rock & roll swindle being perpetrated by major record labels against hapless underground acts, penned — probably not coincidentally — the same year In Utero came out.
Albini did go on to work with other big-ticket clients, including Bush and the duo of reunited Led Zeppelin-ites Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, and upgraded to his own standalone Chicago studio, Electrical Audio, in 1997. But mostly he remained the proud curmudgeon he always was, while, on the musical side, settling into Shellac, which proved to be his definitive and most enduring project. A spartan trio rounded out by Trainer and bassist (and fellow esteemed recording engineer) Bob Weston, the band could sound crushingly heavy, charmingly playful or dauntingly weird from moment to moment. (Sadly, Albini’s death came only a little more than a week before the May 17 release of Shellac’s long-awaited sixth LP, To All Trains.)
Like all other endeavors involving Albini, Shellac operated by its own rules. In a new cover story on the band in The Wire, writer Emily Pothast revealed, somewhat shockingly, that she had not been allowed to hear a note of the trio’s new album in advance, as is music-journalism custom. “We’re trying not to play favorites with people,” Albini told her. Providing the music to select insiders ahead of time, he added, “creates this weird power structure when certain people get access, and they feel like they’re in a little club, and then it becomes like a promotional gambit… It’s just a whole thing that we don’t want to participate in.”
Albini’s long track record of opting out of structures that didn’t suit him could have led to an embittered and isolated maturity. But each time he flashed across the pop culture radar in recent years — chowing down on steak sandwiches with Anthony Bourdain at Chicago institution Ricobene’s on Parts Unknown; skeptically presenting himself to the camera in Dave Grohl’s Sonic Highways doc, dressed, as usual, in his navy-blue Electrical Audio jumpsuit; chopping it up with fellow Chicago indie-rock veteran Fred Armisen ahead of a gala event benefiting Letters to Santa, the local charity co-founded by Albini’s wife, Heather Whinna — he seemed increasingly lighter, less burdened by his troll-ish tendencies. He even saw fit to publicly atone for some of the more unsavory statements of his earlier, more tone-deaf days, such as the “inexcusable” name he chose for a short-lived project dating from the years between Big Black and Shellac.
Albini of course remained as principled and uncompromising as ever, and as quick with a spicy take (cue up this highly entertaining 2015 interview from the Kreative Kontrol podcast to hear Albini unceremoniously diss the D.C. band Rites of Spring in front of fellow punk legend Ian MacKaye, a friend and collaborator of that group’s members for decades). But perhaps he felt less compelled to get in people’s faces about it. After all, his four-decade body of work — Big Black, Shellac, his withering and still-incisive rhetoric and, of course, those beautifully brutal, punishing yet purifying drums — speaks loud enough on its own.
