Fluxblog 471: The Steve Albini Sound
Plus new music by Broadcast, The Marías, and Jessica Pratt. Also, a second bonus playlist!
Steve Albini passed away suddenly this week at the age of 61. Albini was like a Gen X folk hero – a pioneer of the American indie underground as a member of Big Black and Shellac, an opinionated pundit going back to the zine era, and most importantly, one of the best recording engineers of all time. Albini worked on an enormous number of albums in his career, and several of them are unimpeachable classics. Few people have ever been as good at making rock music sound urgent, forceful, and alive. He was a genius of recording drums in particular, presenting music with a wide dynamic range, and exceptionally gifted at capturing the magic of performers playing in a room together.
THE STEVE ALBINI SOUND is a playlist collecting highlights from his large body of work that I believe highlight his highly distinctive style and ear for dynamics. It features music by a lot of crucial figures in alternative music – Pixies, PJ Harvey, Nirvana, Breeders – as well as several key recordings by post-rock, punk, metal, and singer-songwriter acts. The Apple version of this playlist includes music by his own bands and Joanna Newsom that are not on Spotify, and the YouTube version includes those songs along with collaboration with Jimmy Page and Robert Plant and unreleased music from his aborted sessions with Fugazi.
[Spotify | Apple Music | YouTube]
I actually have two playlists for you this week, as the Albini retrospective was made last minute because I was getting a lot of requests for it after his death was announced on Wednesday. The other playlist is THOSE LONELY LONELY NIGHTS, a soundtrack-style mix focused on music from the 1970s with a heavy emphasis on soul, blues, and gospel sounds. I like this one a lot, it's simply just a really wonderful vibe.
[Spotify | Apple Music | YouTube]
The Man In The Time Machine Knows When
Broadcast “Colour in the Numbers”
The opening track on Spell Blanket, a collection of demos Broadcast created between 2006 and 2009 for a follow-up to Tender Buttons that never came to be, is a brief recording of Trish Keenan singing a snippet of a hook while walking around outside. It sounds like it’s just come to her in a flash of inspiration, there’s a slight hestitation as she sings some of the words as though she’s figuring out the phrasing as she’s going along. You can hear her steps, you can hear some ambient noise. The song sounds like it would’ve been amazing, perhaps even something career-defining, but this is all we have of it. It’s a trade off, I suppose – a fully realized ballad, or a document of an artist at work and truly being herself not long before she died. I like having this recording, I like feeling close to Trish in this moment. I like hearing her be creative and alive.
Some of the songs on Spell Blanket are more or less fully formed, albeit fairly lo-fi. The lo-fi sound suits the out-of-time quality of Broadcast’s music, making the music sound like it’s from either 60 years ago or 60 years from now. It makes the name of the band seem more literal, like we’re hearing something that was transmitted at some point and recorded for posterity. Keenan’s melodies often sound incredibly old and extremely English, like she was tapped into some Jungian collective unconscious of British folk melodies.
“Colour in the Numbers,” one of the most fully realized tracks on the collection, sounds so familiar that I figure it must be drawing on something I’ve encountered at some point. A traditional melody, something very old or religious? Something from a lost BBC children’s show from the mid 20th century? Is that loop a sample, even if Keenan and James Cargill are the only credited songwriters? In any case, the overdubbed harmonies are a wonderful showcase for Keenan’s distinctive voice. She sounds childlike, she sounds like an adult, she sounds like an android, she sounds like a ghost. She sounds like she knows something, and this is the closest we’ll get to figuring out what it was.
Buy it from Warp Records.
A Virtual Connection
The Marías “No One Noticed”
“No One Noticed” is a song about contemporary long-distance romance, but one where the lyrical emphasis is placed almost entirely on feeling lonely and desperate for intimacy. There’s a lot of love and affection in María Zardoya’s vocals and in the delicate and dreamy quality of the arrangement, but the emotional undertow of the song is in the awareness that this “virtual connection” is just a temporary solution for her real problem. The music builds up the romance but undercuts it the second half as she considers what would happen if she were to fly to their city: “Hold me, console me, and then I leave without a trace.” That last part cuts deep – not just for confronting the futility head-on, but also in how it sounds like she’s talking herself out of something she needs.
Buy it from Amazon.
Our Sin’s The Lovin’ Kind
Jessica Pratt “Get Your Head Out”
Here in the Pitch is one of the best sounding new records I’ve encountered from the past few years. It’s like the audio equivalent of very beautiful black and white photography printed on matte paper so the blacks are especially deep and the grey tones are rich and nuanced. It’s an album where the tonal palette is so carefully selected and the reverb is so precisely calibrated that elements as ordinary as the human voice, an acoustic guitar, or a vintage organ get nudged into painterly abstraction without losing form and function. There’s a poetry to this sound Jessica Pratt and Al Carson have devised that’s very intuitive and in some ways nostalgic but difficult to put into words without resorting to purple prose.
“Get Your Head Out” captivates me in large part because it’s an evocative sensory experience that’s just outside my capacity to describe it. A lot about it feels familiar, but just as much about the recording is either uncanny or triggers a deja-vu effect. Pratt’s composition and vocal performance is clearly rooted in mid-20th century easy listening and I’m pretty sure she and Carson were deliberately aiming for the odd cosmic tonality of mid-century reverb. But despite this old timey quality, the song doesn’t register as a retro pastiche to me. It’s more like reaching back to the music of the past to create an overwhelming romantic atmosphere beyond the boundaries of contemporary fashion, and that’s just as much in the sound of the recording as it is in Pratt’s gorgeous and low-key jazzy vocal melody.
The most mesmerizing element of “Get Your Head Out” is Carson’s organ and mellotron parts, which sound misty or like light reflecting on rippling water at night. Those parts are fairly quiet in the mix, implying a weightlessness relative to Pratt’s voice and guitar. But even those central elements don’t take up too much space in the mix, and the whole song feels light enough to carry on a breeze.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
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• Christopher Weingarten interviewed Steve Albini for Stereogum’s career-spanning We’ve Got A File On You series shortly before he died, as there’s a new Shellac record coming out soon. It’s a great piece, and I’m glad it was Weingarten who got to do it.
• New York Magazine republished Steve Albini’s Grubstreet Diet from 2018 this week. It’s a great read, one of the all-time best in the series.
• Here are some more tributes to Albini from Rob Sheffield, Austin Kleon, and Grayson Haver Currin.
• The Finals blog wrote about Tommy Richman’s surprise R&B hit “Million Dollar Baby,” which hit #2 on the Hot 100 out of nowhere through TikTok hype. It’s a cool song!
• The Singles Jukebox crew got together to mostly praise Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso,” which is on track to become the ubiquitous pop hit of summer 2024.
• Speaking of “Espresso,” the panel show After Midnight shows my recent popular tweet about that song in this clip from last night’s episode, around the 11 minute mark. I assume a producer just really liked the tweet because it’s not especially funny, and a little too wordy. I don’t blame host Taylor Tomlinson for just giving up on it halfway through after having to say “syntax” on a comedy show.
Tommy Richman and Sabrina Carpenter in an early fight for song of the summer
Hey Matthew. Regarding Steve - I can't lie, with all the tributes since he died, the column he wrote in Forced Exposure nearly 40 years ago regarding Pure magazine continues to haunt me to this day. I subscribed when I was in college, so I read it then and not as part of some sort of campaign against him. I own "Atomizer" and even the "Rema Rema" 45. I get the edgelord thing and I know it got the reaction it intended, but did he ever really address what he wrote? I mean, in the next issue, he downplayed it a bit, but it was still fucked up. And two years ago, he was still referring to Peter Sotos as a friend. IDK. I'm struggling with this. In a culture where forgiveness is extremely rare, the whole "youth, provacateur, edgelord, maybe I went to far" rings a bit hollow to me. I don't think he was a pedophile, but he put stuff in my head that has been living rent free for years.