Review Summary: Albini's first band releases it's first LP and atomizes all other alternative and punk music at the time.
In ordinary circumstances, Big Black were a band that could not physically have happened anywhere else but mid eighties America, like their cross-ocean brothers The Clash. A country gripped by the same economic downturn and conservative rule as it's ally and neighbor, Britannia, some Americans reacted in the exact same way as most of us Brits did. They made offensive, loud and feedback driven punk music, with often obscene and confrontational lyrics.
Big Black were a band that typified this attitude, angular, smashing and sawed off edges all danced around the burning corpse of uncle Sam, cutting up the memory of the country and pissing on it's rotted flesh. Theirs, and many countless other groups angry reactions were born out of the governments complete refusal to accept their disgraceful conditions in which they lived, they were a necessary catharsis, one that instead of suggesting alternatives, spat in the face of diplomacy and government.
Atomizer is the band's first full length LP, and it is a loud one. Steve Albini is the obvious puppet master, as usual, and he stamps his influence from the first track, the less than insidious Jordan Minnesota, a furious, explosive start to the album, in which the (at times) almost unlistenably jagged guitar sound cuts with ease through a wave of ambient feedback like a stanley knife. Factory robot drums stomp around relentlessly, looking for something to smash and crush underfoot, never letting up pace while Steve roars away in the background, only giving way for the occasional 'OOOW' or 'UHHH'. It's a frantic opener, and one that sets the pace for the rest of the record.
Passing Complexion is next up, and it's more melodic, reserved, but no less brutal and punishing in it's approach. With a bizarre yet captivating and catchy synthesizer, Steve continues his audio onslaught. Big Money and the six minute epic Kerosene follow next, and really begin to hammer home the unforgiving approach of the band, noise layered ham-fistedly over a bed of noise, it's intriguing, but like the Jesus & Mary Chain, at times is extremely harsh on the eardrums.
With musical traces of (the obvious) punk, electronic music, avant-garde modernism and vocal music, Big Black not only offer up a realistic and grim portrait of life as bored, penniless middle Americans, they put it to a horror soundtrack which never seems to give up, instead fighting for it's life until the last breath is squeezed out of it at the end of Cables.
Though cliché to say, the album really does what it says in atomizing all traces of conventional pop and alternative music, and instead chooses to serve it up pulped and blended in a barbed wire chalice. It is a disgusting and at times strangely horrific mix but it really works, and is perfectly complimented by Albini's tortured and helpless screams and yells throughout. Indeed, Albini may be without a hope in hell, but he won't go down quietly, his lyrics burst through the speakers with unforgiving urgency, and although they're low in the mix, they rip through the swathes of noise and feedback like a crystal clear shard of broken glass and leave the listener completely scarred.
