1. ShellacAt Action Park
It’s funny because I did this album list and I am into the whole album At Action Park, but there’s only about three tracks that I go back to again and again and that’s ‘Crow’, ‘Boche’s Dick’ and the first one, ‘My Black Ass’. Sometimes I will listen to it all, but they’re just creamy riff heaven. And there’s almost a techno element to it, it feels blocky, like it’s made out of angles rather than anything circular, but still the production’s quite warm, it just draws you in. ‘Crow’ is just amazing: Todd Trainer is an incredible drummer. It’s really hard to drum without hi-hats as well; a lot of the drum patterns, the timing of them is incredible because they’re so stripped back. There’s so much room to fail when you drum like that and he doesn’t, it’s just amazing.
I find that really weird about Steve Albini’s stuff. He’s got this total aggression, but because he’s just a master of texture and he just uses all of this amazing equipment to give this angular but slightly fuzzy production, that just draws you in. At Action Park is clinical but it’s certainly not inhuman – it’s weirdly seductive music. It is very male though. I don’t think my girlfriend is into Shellac. Albini is kind of quite comical when he sings because he just sounds like a bullied school kid getting back at the world a bit. He possibly was, and he just thought, ‘Right, I’m gonna make war on humanity by becoming the best record producer known to man’ or something.
I haven’t heard Dude Incredible. It’s a good title. I bought the most recent one before that, Excellent Italian Greyhound, but I didn’t really get on with it. I think there was one on it I liked, [but] I think I’d just had my fill of them. I tend to binge on music – like I’ll just hammer it for ages and then go off it.
