Songs About Fucking (1987)

Steve Albini, his weenie drum machine, and his big bad earth-shredding team of guitars, which typically sound recorded through some narrow aperture, as if overheard, set themselves to making one of the strangest and most obnoxiously fascinating and compulsively listenable rock 'n' roll albums ever. I'm not sure there's anything else like this, aside from other Big Black albums and Albini projects, and even none of them ever quite gets it all together the way this one does. Operating as a kind of zombie new wave album, complete with eccentric choice of cover songs—Kraftwerk's "The Model" (with Cheap Trick's "He's a Whore" for the CD version)—it lurches and skitters across entire tonal ranges of a certain register of mood: white-hot attack on "L Dopa," laconic shock tale on "Bad Penny," incoherent petulance on "Fish Fry," hysterical shrieking dynamics on "Ergot," and don't miss the methodically turgid exercise of the long song, "Kitty Empire," which finally achieves its glory only toward the end of its interminable four minutes. Yeah, that's you I see banging your head in time to it. Occasional tracks, or moments of them anyway, appear to fall into a rut of thrashing merely for the sake of thrashing, unable to quite transcend, yet even so luxuriating in the physical sensations, and always finding their ways to and blatantly flashing those strange noises Albini & crew manage to wring from guitars. Only the one of the album's 14 songs is longer than two and a half minutes, one is 36 seconds, and the whole thing comes in at just over half an hour. You never have to wait long for the next gesture, and it's a real roller-coaster ride of a half an hour. The title and the cover art are there for the decoration value—which is to say, strictly to nonplus. But I bet he got you.