Albini's Big Black At Home With Its Inner Demons

Big Black's songs were about the same disturbing characters Charles Bukowski wrote about in his poetry, short stories and novels. From blue-collar meatheads ("Steelworker") to small-town pedophiles ("Jordan, Minnesota"), leader Steve Albini painted dark pictures of dysfunctional America, done mostly in blacks and blues ("Fists of Love," "Bazooka Joe," "Kerosene").

Adopting the twitching, slashing guitar and muscle-bound bass of Gang of Four, mixing in a metronomic drum machine on steroids and topping it off with its self-described "cat-being-run-over" vocals, this late, great Chicago band produced unrelenting, angry, hard-grooved music that reveled in controversial lyrics and album presentation.

In 1983, guitarist/studio whiz Albini put out the first effort, the Lungs EP, doing most of the work himself. Musically stark, lyrically uncomfortable, this sparsely arranged release (guitar, bass, drum machine) presented a depressing view of life, featuring songs about troubled people with violent and puerile interests.

On the Bulldozer EP, released in 1984 and featuring Pat Byrne on drums and Santiago Durango on guitar, the band moved to a thicker sound, due in part to the addition of Jeff Pezzati (who was also in Naked Raygun at the time) on bass. The music itself was not as stark as on the first EP, but lyrically the songs were about even more violent, screwed up people. Once again Albini's characters are reduced to their most basic elements and instincts. Driven by survival, hedonism and various negative urges, they are killers, rapists, hunters, fighters, rednecks -- people acting on purely animalistic urges. A little less edgy, but still musically raw, the Racer-X EP came out that same year.

David Riley replaced Pezzati on bass for the band's first full-length wax, 1986's Atomizer, the knockout punch after a series of musical jabs. Powerful as a jackhammer, angry as a junkyard dog, this album let loose with a fury on tracks such as "Stinking Drunk," "Big Money" and the monumental "Jordan, Minnesota." In releasing this album, Big Black crossed over from a band under the influence of others, to one that became an influence for future bands. Following Atomizer, Touch & Go, Big Black's label, issued The Hammer Party ('86), combining the first two EPs in its vinyl version, the first three EPs in its CD version.

After Atomizer, the band released another EP, Headache ('87), in which they seemed to have fallen off course a bit, making music that just wasn't up to previous standards. After some 7-inch releases, a live album - Sound of Impact - and another compilation - The Rich Man's Eight Track Tape - the band released its last and best album, Songs About Fucking. Loud, heavy, angry, unrelenting, lyrically abrasive, this was an appropriate finish to the band's career.

Certainly a reaction to the trendy New Wave sweeping America's airwaves (and the burgeoning MTV), Big Black was nevertheless quite different from the punk and hardcore devotees in the mid-'80s underground. While bands in these genres were taking on Ronald Reagan, high school bullies and promotion of the straight-edge lifestyle, Big Black was more concerned with scarier, small-town issues like incest, child abuse and violent racists.

The band broke up just as the smell of success was in the air, apparently because Albini didn't want too many idiots liking his band. Albini is a smart, talented musician and producer, and he obviously knew that a corporate label would want the band to tame down the lyrics, lighten up the music and do away with offensive cover art.

Guitarist Santiago Durango (also a Naked Raygun alum) decided to go to law school, as well. He did find time, nonetheless, to record two albums with Arsenal (Manipulator and Factory Smog), working with Naked Raygun's Pierre Kezdy on the second release.

Albini went on to form Rapeman in 1988 with former Scratch Acid members David Wm. Sims (bass) and Rey Washam (drums). Producing one EP (Budd) and one LP (Two Nuns and a Pack Mule) before splitting up, this powerful band featured Albini's trademark humorous lyrical style and unrelenting musical assault.

Since '88, Albini channeled much of his energy into producing some of alternative music's most compelling, hard-hitting albums -- The Pixies' Surfer Rosa; Jesus Lizard's Pure; The Breeders' Pod; Nirvana's In Utero; Scrawl's Travel On, Rider -- putting his sonic stamp on the increasingly popular world of alternative music. Also, since 1993, Albini has put out releases with his latest project, Shellac.

There's little doubt that Big Black could have become a huge act had it continued on, but regardless the band's suffocating music, studio techniques and dark lyrics paved the way for the Industrial Revolution and bands such as Filter, Gravity Kills, Marilyn Manson, Ministry, Nine Inch Nails, Rage Against the Machine, White Zombie and many others.

While Ministry had been around since 1981's EP, Cold Life, it wasn't until 1986's Twitch that the band began to explore the darker, more pounding music that has become its trademark. Producing music in the same town - Chicago - as Big Black, no doubt had an effect on the direction Alain Jourgensen took his project.

Trouser Press' Record Guide describes Nine Inch Nails' 1989 release Pretty Hate Machine as an album by a "junior industrialist" taking out his anxiety and despair on the rest of the world. But it goes on to say: "But while the tracks are springier and less stringent than on other like-minded hammer parties, the vocals carry very little in terms of threat." Hey, you can't blame a guy for trying. Of course, since 1989, NIN has gone on to do a great deal more musically and commercially.

As for White Zombie, this band has been around since 1986, producing increasingly more disturbing, hard-hitting albums. Heavy on guitar, strangled vocals and often-funky bass, Rob Zombie and Company was no doubt aware of Big Black during its formative years.

While Marilyn Manson, eponymous singer of the Florida industrial band, claims influences such as Black Sabbath, David Bowie and Alice Cooper, Big Black undeniably fits right into that progression. Admittedly less theatrical than Bowie or Cooper, Albini nonetheless took on the voices of his twisted, angry characters.

Rage Against the Machine, on the other hand, eschews rock and roll theater, in favor of hard-hitting, political music. While its in-your-face, left-wing tunes aren't in line with Big Black's lyrical bent, Rage is musically similar. Utilizing gradual buildups, sustained sonic assaults and stop-start grooves with bass/drums/guitar, the two bands are cut from the same cloth.

So, as hard-edged, groove-tinged music has entered the deep end of the mainstream, a great deal of credit and thanks must be given to forerunners like Steve Albini's Big Black.

Viva the Industrial Revolution!