I think this list is kind of funny, since from all the ways Albini talks about his production style it’s pretty clear that he doesn’t think he himself has much to do with the music. And even from the outside, he is celebrated almost as much for happenstance as he is for actually doing anything. His production style is essentially, “record whatever the fuck the band is doing and don’t change anything.” Which isn’t me shitting on him, really; he’s allowed many a good rock band to make an album they likely wouldn’t have been able to make otherwise because he’s somehow built enough cred that major labels (!) assume he knows what he’s doing (mostly) and/or let him do whatever ‘cause he gets it done fast and with minimal overhead. But this is also serendipity, in a way: Albini’s production is famous for his non-production, he is ubiquitous for his non-fussiness, and he is celebrated for his no-nonsense mannerisms.

And so we get him recording a noise-rock jazz-inflected thing of a group that knocks free and no wave together like the shit was always meant to be. They were right, and Albini applies a light glaze of Big Blackness that allows the band to really shine as they spiral out of control. Make it Pop! is still the best punk album of the millennium, even if, as this list suggests, Mclusky has more accessible traction. But just listen to this stuff! This is the wet dream John Zorn has every night.

Nina Nastasia has become one of my favorite artists in recent years, but I dread covering her. Which is fine with me, since I’m in good company: even the ever-quotable Mr. Albini worried about sounding foolish when pressed to describe the woman’s power. Nevertheless, I’ve never been shy saying that this is one album I think everybody should own, but I’m always at a loss to explain why, to convey what it is everyone’s missing. I could tell you about Nastasia’s vocie, as clean, haunted, and beautiful as an instrument as any that’s ever come down the pike. Or I could tell you about her songwriting. I can get fancy and say something like, “Faulknerian in scope, but like Hemingway in execution” But that’s so unsatisfying next to the actual experience of The Blackened Air.

So let me tell you a about another word people throw around when discussing this record: “rustic.” This is a word that, to me, invokes a certain flavor of bread, but it is fairly useful. Nastasia was lumped into the indie-folk genre, and certainly the spare, sympathetic arrangements her bandmates lend these songs (violins, contra bass, accordion, even a musical saw) make it fit right in. Henceforth it makes her songs seem like vignettes of a forgotten era, like something from Steinbeck. There are ghosts “In the Graveyard,” there’s a subservient woman announcing “I Go to Him” when his man needs clothing, there are stars above. But there’s also a fifty foot tall woman dying in the ocean, a man peeping in on a young girl while icicles melt, a mother wanting to kill her daughter for making ugly faces. There’s also the fact that every single drum hit on this record goes right through the red—whether it’s to bring the roof down on the title song, to give her voice that extra push on “In the Graveyard,” or to bang out the death march of “This is What it Is.” That’s what I mean when I lament the shortcomings of language: you find an angle, you find a nice container to put your feelings and impression in, and then the thing itself just explodes that container. This partly explains why Albini does his best work with Nastasia: in the face of such monumental music, he does his job best by merely getting out of its way.

If you fell in love with Ys when it came out less than two years ago, chances are you don’t need a reminder of what makes it great—to recap (sigh): Strings! Van Dyke Parks! Über-lengthy songs! Greek mythology! Flaming meteors! And,if you despised the record, chances are you haven’t forgotten why you loath it so (see: preceding string of exclamations). So, rather than reiterating the already effusive praises of Ys‘s sheer grandiosity and big-leap-from-the-debut-ness, I’d like to comment briefly on the second, less-talked-about dimension this album inhabits: that of the intimate and extremely personal, wherein Newsom achieves more emotional weight than she ever could have with a thousand Parks-arranged orchestras. It’s on this level where Newsom’s songwriting revels in the same poignancy that earned The Milk-Eyed Mender (2004) its accolades, though it may take a little more digging to realize that.

What I’m trying to say here is that beneath Ys‘s sweeping shock-and-awe lie some incredibly affecting moments stitched from Newsom’s deft use of language and unflinching boldness. Though these moments are scattered throughout (look no further than the matronly devotion expressed in “Only Skin”), “Sawdust & Diamonds” is a good place to start as it strips away all of the adornments, leaving only Newsom and her rhythmic harp playing. “And though our bones they may break, and our souls separate—why the long face? And though our bodies recoil from the grip of the soil—why the long face?” she sings with courage.

With all of Ys‘s bells and whistles, such simple yet powerful moments risk being overlooked, just as Steve Albini’s recording work has been overshadowed by Parks’s busy arrangements. Albini does a fantastic job in his own right, though, catching every one of Newsom’s flitting emotions with a steady, gentle hand.

It seems appropriate that Magnolia Electric Co., Songs: Ohia’s final album, should be the band’s first with Steve Albini. Jason Molina, the singer-songwriter and sole unifying force behind the band, spent the latter part of the ‘90s earning a reputation as a pretty adventurous collaborator. Every new Songs: Ohia album seems to feature a different line-up, different producers, and a different sonic palette. But there got to be a time, somewhere between The Lioness and Didn’t it Rain, where Songs: Ohia started to solidify and seem like a real unit with a discernible sound to match Molina’s distinct tenor. And they chose to commit their music to tape with Albini, whose analog tendencies and old school approach suit the sound that Molina and company had settled upon extremely well.

The results are unparalleled. Magnolia Electric Co. is easily Molina’s finest work; an album of remarkable emotional intensity and sadness, all wrapped up in muscular ‘70s rock with plenty of ringing guitars and pedal steel. It’s an album that really feels like the work of a band, not just one guy and some session musicians. And it has that Albini sheen to it. There’s a richness and strength to the sound that seems to perfectly match Molina’s vision of Midwestern sturdiness in the face of depression and alienation. Molina’s haunting solo demos for the record, included with the initial pressing, show how delicate and painful these tracks are at core; it’s an impressive feat to be able to flesh them out and maintain the intensity and beauty of the songs.

People will point to In Utero or the Jesus Lizard’s own Goat (see below x2) as the best unhinged rock albums of the 1990s, but Liar will always be my favorite, in tandem with Rid of Me. Or maybe the more hinged No Pocky for Kitty, but nobody else voted for Superchunk (tear).

Anyway: Liar. Moreso than Goat, in my estimation, Liar shows the Jesus Lizard provoking through the sheer feel of their music, in the sense that this is the apex of the noise/hardcore/slowcore/metal/rock/grunge hybrid they were famous for mostly because the edges are a bit more refined. But even in that refining the Jesus Lizard discovered how to make their music more ragged, more sprawling, and more emotive, no longer relying on the sheer bombast present in their previous work by embracing a caustic aesthetic that hangs like a pall over Liar‘s duration. Plus, “Zachariah” is one of the most haunting refutations of early ’90s hip corporate culture ever. Liar is grunge music dying inside; Liar is the lie of the popularity of the “Seattle sound” in the first place; Liar is the most perfect statement of what the early 1990s sounded like, a DNA strand that ties everything good before to everything good after drowning in its own internal conflict.

“Prayer to God” is not just the best song on 1000 Hurts, nor is it simply the best Shellac song, nor is it just the best song Albini ever recorded—it’s, like, the best song, period. Each word precision-placed textually and the music a lumbering monstrosity, the track incinerates on impact, a hydrogen bomb almost Faulkneresque in its sparse severity. If that makes any sense. Which it shouldn’t: this is family-killin’ music. What starts as a matricidal daydream wanders quickly from the specifics of her dispatch (“Where her garments come together / Where I used to lay my face”) into a much more palpable, visceral bloodlust. The tipping point, of course, is the narrators’ father, all actual fucking anger and an amen, a mantra without a trace of wit or humor, just, like: “Kill him! Just fucking kill him!”

It’s some serious shit. On its own, “Prayer to God” reasserts Rock Music as something dangerous and real, like a stranger in the room with a knife. Within the context of Shellac’s 1000 Hurts, it thunders a chord of antipathy that resounds through the remainder of the record in tones snarky, brutish, and perverse. The album is sonically definitive of the Albini sound, and the music seems structured specifically to take advantage of this. Hence the alternate chunk and snarl of “Ghosts,” the cavernous stretch between high- and low-end on “New Number Order,” the first minute of “Squirrel Song” and the razor-wire bass line that stretches taught over it before the bloodspray chorus. Pressed on vinyl dark and heavy like light things never existed, form meets function, and Albini’s big fuck-you sound finds its near-perfect distillation.

Albini has had a hand in projects more sludge-soaked, more vitriolic, more reckless, so it’s rather foolish, cliché even, to categorize Rid of Me as such, but there is something indelibly heavy about PJ Harvey’s first foray into the major label arena. The way the hooks kicks the listener in the chest of “Missed,” the sinister, disenchanted squealing on “Man-Size Sextet,” and “50 Ft. Queenie”’s castrating sneer, they all come together to form a massive ball of frustration with “5000 tons” marked on its side.

As opposed to the unbridled antipathy of, say, 1000 Hurts, which projects its repugnance into the outside world like a thousand flaming arrows, Rid of Me‘s turmoil is directed inward. The rancor Harvey is spewing here has only one recipient; as it reflects off her cramped room’s vacant walls, back from whence it came. This is why the quiet desperation of “Yuri G”’s opening moments feels scarier than any monster face Harvey attempts to put on throughout the album: because inner turmoil is harder to articulate; more arresting when captured than any other sensation. Beneath the layers of sewage-line guitars and irritated drums is a much more contemplative, terrifying record realized only through meticulous examination.

John Gardner’s Grendel is an engrossing novel that follows Beowulf‘s storyline through the eyes of its antagonist, revealing the villain as little but a self-loathing misanthrope traipsing about the forest aimlessly, with head down, occasionally terrorizing townspeople, who have deemed him a monster. It’s a simple concept, one I’m positive is explored in college psychology classes, that fear and loneliness breeds desperation and desperation breeds aggression with all its consequences. In PJ Harvey’s case, it just breeds sonically repugnant beauty.

I was just walking home from Canadian Tire on Elm St. when I looked up an saw a sun-faded copy of Born to Run facing out from behind a street-level window. And, of course, that’s kind of cool and peaceful and Romantic and calming, but it’s also like, “Whoa. I guess Born to Run is now a symbol more than an album. Weird.” When do we get to that point with Songs About Fucking? Where it, simply leaning quietly against a mantle somewhere, is somehow peaceful and nostalgic and not: Fucking. Do we get there? Ever?

Can we? Songs About Fucking should make us more uncomfortable than it does, I think, because either it’s a chilling expose of some of the worst human desires or it’s a celebration of them or it’s just a lazy and juvenile indulgence in them. I mean, I get that the band’s focus was always the “desperate entertainments” of a post-industrial society; I’m just not always sure I’m not fan-wanking that back around into something I can enjoy without feeling conflicted. And I’m not talking pearl-clutching either: “ooky” is a perfectly valid artistic point too, but even if that’s the case this album deserves far more analysis than the general “it’s dark and brutal” commentary it gets, where critics seemingly think that nothing they could say would be as chilling as songs like “Precious Thing” or “Fish Fry” and therefore use verbs like “drilling” about an album which features “Precious Thing” and “Fish Fry.” Icky. Sure, this album is “dark and brutal,” but the cover already tells you that, or at least the back cover does, with its sketch that could only be titillating to a rapist. That the front cover is more ambiguous is telling, I think; like superficial analyses of the songs, once you turn them around…

I hope it’s that way more than the other, and in that sense Songs About Fucking is a great album—it’s even Important, at least in the lineages of punk and post-punk and industrial, tying Wire and Pere Ubu and PiL together and dousing that shit with lighter fluid—that presents sex as a hidden and dirty secret that motivates and organizes and preoccupies American life. Set against a chilling backdrop of the Sound of this album: screeching guitars and Roland drum machine and screaming, that sense of dislocation in modern life and modern sexual culture is palpable and disarming. And welcome to patient zero (almost) of Albini’s production technique: non-production. Everything is made to sound pretty much exactly like it did when the band played it. Loud. This album is crucial to understanding modern music; just don’t call it a “dark and brutal punk album” and leave your analysis dangling on the door frame.

Mclusky’s been eulogized to the point of hyperbolic mythologizing, and the Glow’s not doing much to curb the impression that all this post-mortem adoration is akin to fawning over the memory of a dysfunctional ex, as we gloss over their inherent flaws and spout forth bullshit that approximates to “Like Jesus Lizard? Fuckin’ better than!” Because shards of noise and snark don’t a great band make, and we’re all just in love with Falco’s acid tongue, and something about being derivative of the Pixies and on and on.

Well, skeptical reader, you might wanna check your front door, because “No New Wave No Fun” just took a dump on your porch, and kicked your sister in the face when she opened the door to yell at it. It’s impossible to enjoy Do Dallas as much as it enjoys itself (hello, “The World Loves Us And Is Our Bitch”), but it’s equally difficult to loathe it as much as it does itself, ditto for any other emotion one can conjure up. Forgotten behind the bombast of “Lightsabre Cocksucking Blues” are, despite the band’s best attempts to cover their sentiment in irony and assholery, a slew of confused, acutely affecting half-thoughts. Buried in “Day of Deadringers” deprecating diatribe is this confounding gem: “If I had to choose a woman/ Then I think I’d choose religion.” This could easily be construed as a giggle-worthy Falcoism that amounts to yet another cleverly phrased “fuck everything,” but I’d like to think it’s a lot like a nervous joke—funny, yeah, but a little disconcerting. I wouldn’t say Do Dallas is rife with such moments, but they’re there, floating in the murk of disintegrating riffs and muffled shrieks, the hidden fuel for the window-shattering Molotov cocktails Falco so casually lobs throughout the album’s exhaustive, exhausting 36 minute duration.

Perhaps I’m just lauding Mclusky with a different sort of unsubstantiated praise by mining their lyric booklets for deeper meaning; maybe I’m more full of shit than the critics I’m commenting upon, but hey, one can already assume I’ve adored the shit out of this ever since it served as my introduction to the defunct Welch trio. So, just to avoid confusion: did I mention it’s great? ‘Cause it’s great.

Kim Deal and Steve Albini have always made for a good team. I saw the Breeders play a few weeks back and Deal started chatting with the audience about how happy she was to be back in Chicago. And then she followed it up with a couple words about her long-time engineer: “Albini’s weird.” Deal’s a weird one too, and Albini captures the most endearingly strange elements of Deal’s musical vision in a way that I can’t imagine anyone else doing. He’s able to mirror the Breeders fractal lyrics and off-kilter instrumentation perfectly in his approach to recording and engineering. Instruments are recorded from across rooms, you can often hear singers move closer or farther from the mic, and he’s happy to call attention to the flubbed note, the gleeful laugh, or the cigarette being lighted. He makes garage rock sound authentically like garage rock, and no one does garage rock better than the Breeders.

In the last few years this has resulted in two albums (2002’s Title TK and this year’s Mountain Battles) that stand as engineering miracles: records at once totally ramshackle and nearly sonically perfect. They are paradigmatic 21st century Albini records, and if this list were longer they would no doubt have respectable spots. This entry, though, is for the Breeders 1990 debut. Pod proved that both Albini and Deal could do more than loud and crude. Deal’s songwriting is more self-assured and catchy than ever, showing up the Pixies’ Bossanova, released the same year and featuring none of her songs. Likewise, Albini shows a whole new degree of subtlety, producing pop songs with grit and rock songs with a heartfelt edge. The record is easily the band’s most unified statement, despite the fact that this was their most collaborative line-up, and that stands as a testament to the dark, angry, vital sonic landscape that Albini provided for the band.

2002’s Albini produced Mclusky Do Dallas showcased Mclusky as a trio of snarky Welsh assholes, prone to calling your mother a “ballpoint pen thief” while accusing your crappy band of having “fake tits” over ferocious punk grooves evidencing a deadly rhythm section.

The Difference Between You and Me is that I’m Not on Fire showcased Mclusky as menacing assholes. “Without MSG I Am Nothing” sets the decidedly sinister tone; “Everywhere I look is a darkness!” Mclusky aren’t exactly above cracking a good sex criminal joke here and there, except that now they seem utterly evil, especially on the anti-social slash and burn of “Falco vs. the Young Canoeist,” the most chaotic two and a half minutes of their abbreviated career.

And where does Albini factor in? It’s easy to imagine him scowling with delight as he deftly mics Jack Eggleston’s stomach punch kick drum, or forces Jonathan Chapple to detune his bass to bowel churning, sub-Shellac levels (e.g. “That Man Will Not Hang”). But it also helps that Albini masterminded the signature Pixies sound, simply because Mclusky sound a lot like them. Nowhere is this more evident than on the virtual jangle pop of “She Will Only Bring You Happiness,” which could have owned the “Dig For Fire” slot on Bossanova (1990)—a Gil Norton record, I realize.

Ultimately, Mclusky were simply destined for Albini’s wheelhouse. A description of the band can just as easily describe the man himself; connosieurs of unadulterated rock fury with overwhelming doses of sarcasm and nary a keyboard in sight (those would surface with Future of the Left).

In the spirit of Listravaganza, I present you my 10 favorite quotes from the In Utero recording sessions.

But first: these are 100% real and taken from Michael Azerrad’s Come as You Are, all these years later still the best Nirvana-related book out there. Written pre-suicide, it doesn’t focus on eulogizing or forgiving Kurt, and in terms of Nirvana merchandise to drop your money on, it’s about as far as you can get from the grave-scraping (er, urn-scraping…er, maybe not even that anymore since Courtney Love managed to lose his remains and realistically they could be anywhere, which…god, how much worse can it get for Kurt; even as a pile of powdery ashes she’s fucking him over?) shit like his collected personal journals. Which boggles the mind, seeing how the same person responsible for those ever seeing the light of day also famously fought tooth-and-nail over unreleased Nirvana material, trying her best to keep control away from Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl, who were in the fucking band. Whatta gal.

Such is the post-Kurt Nirvana legacy: fraught with absurd drama and questionable releases, all of it distracting from what makes this band worth all this bullshit in the first place. (The ashes disappearing, though…that one was unexpected.) I won’t focus on this for long, but real quick: I can sort of buy some of Love’s claims, and generally Krist seems like he can be a bit of a dick (clue #1: he’s a politician now), so it’s easy to see why she’d clash with him, but fighting with Dave Grohl? C’mon. That just proves she’s trying to be an a-hole. Everybody loves Dave Grohl. Even Steve Albini has a man-crush (“Dave’s a very pleasant, very goofy guy to be around,” which in Albini-speak is tantamount to being BFF) and he hates everyone, Courtney very much included. Shit, he even probably hates himself since inking that deal to work with Bush, the anti-Albini, a band that very clearly and shamelessly wanted to become the soul-devouring, Satan-blowing, “corporate indie” cashcow that DGC was eager for, if not in some ways counting on, Nirvana to embrace post-Nevermind.

Which brings me to why In Utero is a record worth believing in, from the ethos behind it to the face-melting rock it births. First, Albini’s work on both In Utero and (ugh) Razorblade Suitcase mark huge disparities in artistic intent. Whereas Bush unmistakably wanted to cash in on American indie-rock in the mid-‘90s, Kurt—a huge fan of Big Black, Surfer Rosa, and Pod—hired Albini to avoid DGC’s commercial-minded wishes at all costs. He had turned on Nevermind completely, dismissing it as a processed, tamed, corporately constructed version of his music that he was anxious to obliterate with In Utero. Knowing Albini could pull this demolition/re-construction off, they set off to Pachyderm Studios in Minnesota (fun trivia: using the mixing board responsible for Back in Black); a mere week of recording later, Cobain, Novoselic, Grohl, and Albini had sussed out the Great album Nirvana had always been capable of.

Embracing Albini’s first-take, bare-bones approach, Kurt was finally able to capture “the sound that [he] hear[d] in [his] head”—what he had really envisioned for Nirvana before the suits and production gloss and big fat album advances came into play. Even though the band would pussy out a bit when DGC reps balked at the album, eventually hiring Scott Litt to punch-up “All Apologies” and “Heart-Shaped Box” (totally about Love, and boy did he sound smothered), In Utero remains a stubborn rock masterpiece, a “powerful, personal punk rock record” (-Albini) stacked with phenomenal and diverse songs, the lot of them consumed with all the awful Cobain’s psyche could disperse: disease, depression, obvious father issues, rape, Patrick Süskind’s Perfume, perfectly good blankets ruined by cigarettes, “aqua seafoam shame” (whatever the hell that is), abortion tea, love, Love. It was the group’s re-defining statement, the kind of messy rebirth that the title and creepy liner artwork hinted at, uncomfortable squalls of afterbirth (uh, “Tourettes”) and all. This is Nirvana at their most visceral and spontaneous, and it fucking destroys, no less today than it did in 1993. Throw on “Milk It,” you’ll see what I mean.

Alas:

10. Kurt Cobain, on Steve Albini: “Steve was really into lighting his ass on fire. He’d pour rubbing alcohol on his ass and light it on fire. He likes to do that.”

9. Steve Albini, on Nirvana: “R.E.M. with a fuzzbox…an unremarkable version of the Seattle sound.”

8. Steve Albini, on why the fuck he took on the project then, besides that cool $100k: “In a way I felt sorry for them.”

7. Steve Albini, on every other person involved in the enterprise that is Nirvana, besides the band itself: “Every other person involved in the enterprise that is Nirvana, besides the band itself, are pure pieces of shit.”

6. Steve Albini, on the non-Nirvana players and movers and shakers of the music scene: “The players and movers and shakers in the music scene are real pieces of shit.”

5. Steve Albini, on Courtney Love, who Yoko’d up the recording sessions: “I don’t feel like embarrassing Kurt by talking about what a psycho hose-beast his wife is especially because he knows it already.”

4. Courtney Love, in retaliation: “The only way Steve Albini would think I was a perfect girlfriend would be if I was from the East Coast, played the cello, had big tits and small hoop earrings, wore black turtlenecks, had all matching luggage, and never said a word.”

3. Steve Albini, pretending to be Bowie/T. Rex producer Tony Visconti, in a prank call to Eddie Vedder: “Your voice really speaks to me, I can get you in a real band to do some recording.”

(Azerrad: “Vedder bought it.”)

2. Steve Albini, on the album he made for the band he felt sorry for: “I find myself listening to it of my own free will, occasionally.”

1. Krist Novoselic, summing up this record as only the guy who threw his bass ten feet into the air only to have it come down and smash him in the face live on TV could: “Shit, it’s art. What are you going to do about it?”

Until you’ve rubbed your oily digits across the CD foldout’s coarse parchment and caressed the hunched shoulders of its pencil-sketched cheetah-man, you haven’t fully experienced Viva Last Blues, Will Oldham’s third full-length under a Palace moniker. Besides echoing Oldham’s longtime obsession with man’s more bestial qualities, Dianne Bellino’s exquisite cover drawing captures both the worn-in beauty of the record and its almost-indifference towards artistic imperfections. That is to say, it reflects two key aspects of a Steve Albini country/folk recording. Viva Last Blues likely wasn’t Albini’s first country/folk record (dude’s recording projects number in the thousands), and it certainly wasn’t his last. Yet the album provides something of a blueprint for the sound engineer’s approach to the genre that can still be heard even in last year’s devastating You Follow Me by Nina Nastasia and Jim White. Nary an overdub is to be found here as instruments clang, thwack, and jostle with each other in a manner as natural and as ugly as the sex which Oldham readily describes throughout (my personal fav: “Then we mingle our limbs, I hear all calling/ When we swim and we buckle, and I emote”). Oldham’s more-than-able band mates make mistakes which are dutifully documented by our man with the knobs who, perhaps better than anyone, can transform a faux pas into an indispensable element of a song. Viva provides endless examples of this, the best being “Tonight’s Decision (and Hereafter)” when Oldham’s voice inadvertently croaks on “death” like some premature dying rattle. Other producers may have suggested a retake, but Albini knows vellum entertains longer than glossy magazine paper.

The Oldham of Viva is a man nowhere near reaching his goals (whatever they may be) and whose travels have left him with little more than half-images and broken wisdom. Albini nestles the artist’s voice low in mix so as to make our beaten traveler work that much harder to stay on top of thundering rockers like “Cat’s Blues” and “Work Hard/Play Hard”. Elsewhere, on “Old Jerusalem” Oldham sounds close enough to make your ear hairs quiver from his breath. Albini counts Viva Last Blues among his most successful recording projects, and it’s easy to see why: his restrained hand provides the perfect complement to Oldham’s weathered verse, and together the two have produced an album rawer than cow’s hide and just as resilient to time’s beating sands.

The Jesus Lizard might be the only of Big Black’s antecedents to actually outdo them. Humbled, Albini steps back and just lets the band fucking rip on Goat. There’s a deceptive simplicity about this band; they don’t near the noise-level or out-level of post-punk bands like the Birthday Party or the Pop Group. But if any band could cram the most twisted riffs into the tiny spaces in between double-kicks it was them; Goat takes the debauchery of drunken blooze-rock and sludge and pumps it full of adrenalin. They rarely ease up on the energy here, and when they do, as on “Seasick,” they provide the aural equivalent of a drunk trying to steady himself and finding waves of nausea passing through him.

It helps that Goat is one of the best attempts at capturing a live sound without sacrificing quality. The increased presence of bass and drums in the mix doesn’t detract from the jackhammer guitar and David Yow’s vocals, which manage to simultaneously project themselves above the din and sound muffled and un-intelligible; like he’s drowning in the vortex of the music. This is clearly the product of a band that knew what they were about long before they entered the studio: the fact that it’s easy to envision their sweaty, drunken, destructive, naked live shows while listening to Goat is a testament to Albini’s skill at handling them.

It seems as if it was recorded, released, and consumed in one breath; that much is true—the album was made over a few Boston weeks in December of 1987 and released in March 1988, a tour beginning April 8th—but Surfer Rosa is so much more than a first full LP, a head-rush, a golden shower, a haunted house hatefuck, a big goddamned joke about violence and massive penises—Surfer Rosa is everything that this list represents intuitively manifest, Albini the deus ex machina that, by his very callous stare and analog guile, made a band enormous on that band’s terms. It is, unquestionably, badass, but what makes it badass is what also makes it such an obligatory number one, such a staple, and, granted, such an albatross for my critical wherewithal. Is it acceptable to simply say, “I don’t know what else to say?”, or am I expected to recount how Albini recorded Frank Black screaming from the studio’s bathroom or how the studio’s scoured tile floor grips at Joey Santiago’s guitars to make them both tar black and totally ethereal, like sterile and cancerous at once? Meh: Albini is only Albini if he exists in retrospect; an Albini-sized hole is Albini at his best, licensing any band to indulge and grow to a monstrosity of pure ego; not because any band, at their core, is faking humility, but because every band siphons Albini’s ego in to juice their own, as if music must be simply accepted and not because, as it would be otherwise, its essence infiltrated and tainted. This is the writ of Albini, and Surfer Rosa is Albini’s Voice made real, a concoction of love that could only be brought to earth breathing as something scary and ugly and screeching. It is Albini’s Fuck You made flesh.