Shellac
1000 Hurts
Touch And Go
Just about everything Shellac does shouldn’t work. Steve Albini’s guitar sounds exactly like a guitar shouldn’t. They probably shouldn’t write a whole friggin’ song based around a single guitar strum repeated on every one beat. They probably shouldn’t write lyrics about asking god to kill two people for them. They probably shouldn’t skimp on the overdubs since there are only three instruments, playing sparingly at that. And they probably shouldn’t sing at all, because nobody in the band really can. Indeed, Shellac have the whole musical approach thing wrong. Way wrong. But there’s just one catch: Shellac fuckin’ rock. And lucky for us, someone really seems to have pissed Albini off since Terraform. So, add a dose of raw anger to the Spartan power you’ve come to expect from Shellac and you’ve got 1000 Hurts, a record truly worthy of the hefty vinyl it’s pressed on. There are no 12-plus-minutes shoe-in-a-dryer songs on this record. These songs are mostly short, mean, and to the point – a welcome foot in the musical landscape’s whiny emo ass. Buy the record because it comes with a CD for no additional charge, and the package doubles as a handy reel-to-reel tape container.
Touch and Go, P.O. Box 25520, Chicago, IL 60625