Review Summary: A Big Black mess
You’d be hard pressed to find many musicians from the past few decades as prolific as Steve Albini. It would’ve been enough for him to have just put his stamp on the underground music scene with all the stellar music created across his various projects, but he managed to spread his influence to a broader audience over the years, becoming increasingly notorious for both his unique style as a record producer and his generally radical punditry. Indeed, Albini was a lot more than just the producer who made
In Utero sound so nasty, and our friend had proven to have been quite busy years before this.
Big Black started in 1982 as an Albini solo project and would grow into a full band after the first EP under the moniker,
Lungs, was released.
Lungs doesn’t stray far from the post punk sound prominent at the time, but still proves to be a solid beginning for the mad scientist. Big Black’s next work,
Bulldozer, is an important advancement for Albini, namely in that this is where he first started using metal picks in order to experiment with what would become his signature clanky guitar sound. It goes without saying that Albini & Co’s music became a lot more interesting from this point on, but this isn’t the only talking point for the EP; Albini manages to make considerable progressions across the board. The plodding pace of songs from its predecessor is ramped up to a faster level, which serves as a much better complement to Albini’s aggressive snarls. All of this is filled out by some nauseating bass lines and ridiculously clanky guitar melodies, making for the energetic punk-noise fusion that Albini would tinker with for years to come. Aside from that, there’s really not much else to say:
Bulldozer is simply a great collection of songs from a band that would only improve with time.
