The last Shellac album lands with almost shockingly poor taste just ten days after the untimely death of Steve Albini, which in a perverse way makes it rather apt. Albini may have renounced the ‘edgelord’ tendencies of his youth, accepting that ‘I and others of my generation have not been held to task enough for words and behaviour that ultimately contributed to a coarsening society’, but on To All Trains he and his bandmates Todd Trainer and Bob Weston are typically scabrous. If their sixth and unexpectedly final release is poignant only in the somewhat archaic sense of pungent to the smell, piquant or sharp, still the suggestively-titled To All Trains is a fitting cap to a formidable career, preoccupied with death and summarising some of his lifelong bête noirs, while even the cover photograph from the waiting room of Chicago Union Station, rendered in black and white, captures the sense of a terminus with an air of still bristling anticipation.
The sound from the first stabs of gnarly guitar is typically Shellac, a brand of lean, sinewy and acerbic post-punk which they have made their own over the course of three decades, ‘WSOD’ leading off with the line ‘I aspire to bronze, but I’ll settle for lead’ which is really a perfect summation of their dynamic, as Weston’s burnished yet fraying bass rubs up against the angularity of Albini’s guitar while Trainer’s pummelling drums land with a mechanised clatter. The track – which apparently stands for ‘World Series Of Dick-Sucking’ – carries a wiry, filmic quality which evokes the free-for-all drama of a spaghetti Western, but as usual the trio keep things curt as well as taut as they step up to collect their battered medals.
Weston shifts readily from walking bass lines to rapid oscillations like the rebounding of a cable with barely any slack, accompanied by the snarling twang of Albini’s guitar and Trainer’s elastic percussion, as To All Trains drips with a molasses-thick brew of caustic sarcasm and irreverent black humour. After scuttling a scene on ‘Chick New Wave’, another standout track ‘Tattoos’ queries ‘your urgent need to mingle’ and scans like a screed about influence, the illicit but time-honoured practice of copping someone else’s tunes, which is also a theme of the metal-pinching and ecologically-minded ‘Scrappers’ and the looser ‘How I Wrote How I Wrote Elastic Man (cock & bull)’, a tribute to The Fall and a bluntly elliptical account of the songwriting process. Tracks like ‘Chick New Wave’ and ‘Scrappers’ have been live staples as the band steadily ground out the follow-up to 2014’s monkey grip Dude Incredible.
The mesh girdle (or chastity cage) of ‘Wednesday’ ferries a folk melody, a sort of sea shanty about bent backs and the marital act, with brains splattered against the kitchen wall before daybreak on Maundy Thursday. And ‘Days Are Dogs’ charts progress through regret, a cowbell introducing a pulchritudinous yet punctuated groove before Albini broaches one of his favourite pastimes. He semi-famously once said that the first Shellac album At Action Park was all about baseball and Canada, and perhaps he would have found a kindred spirit or viewed as anathema the cult series Northwoods Baseball Sleep Radio, whose episodes entail fake broadcasts of sleepy small-town ballgames, because Shellac always laboured resolutely at their own pace.
After shuttering Big Black at the height of their success and embarking on a career as an audio engineer, Albini became synonymous with the alternative rock boom of the early nineties as he worked on signal albums by the Pixies, The Breeders, PJ Harvey and Nirvana. A proponent of analog recording who largely eschewed overdubs and effects, he excelled at capturing the intimacies of a live band whether they were playing full-throttle noise or something more ornate, aiding the likes of Will Oldham, Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Joanna Newsom up to and including his work on the trenchant Fire! album Testament from earlier this year.
A fervent critic of the music industry, his riposte lay simply in being true to one’s own vision and living in the moment. As the itchy, scratchy and sometimes gossamery ‘I Don’t Fear Hell’ yanks the cabin curtain on To All Trains, he ekes out a refrain which sounds like an apposite farewell, a skewed barb from the vast beyond, a bloodied grin as he butts heads with the grim reaper, to wit:
Something something something when this is over
I’ll leap in my grave like the arms of a lover
And if there’s a heaven, I hope they’re havin’ fun
‘Cause if there’s a hell, I’m gonna know everyone!
Yet if we’re looking for a night cap or coda to Steve Albini’s career it might as well come a few tracks back, on the driving and loaded ‘Days Are Dogs’ when he clearly enunciates ‘If I can’t take it with me, I’ll have it all now’. Judging by mistakes made, lessons learned and the quality of his output, that’s a job well done.
