The year 1986 saw the birth of Perestroika and Glasnost, a thawing of the Cold War and meetings between Reagan and Gorbachev and a general sense of optimism. That is despite the space shuttle Challenger disaster, and the Chernobyl disaster. The Iran-Contra affair breaks, granting brief notoriety to Olly North. Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, and “Baby Doc” Duvalier in Haiti are ousted from power – generally a bad year for tyrants.
The USSR launch the Mir space station, Voyager 2 passes Uranus (making every news bulletin subject to schoolboy sniggers). Halleys Comet passes perihelion. Pixar are formed. The EC becomes the EU with the admission of Spain and Portugal, and The Prince formerly known as Andrew and Sarah Ferguson are married – what great people they turned out to be.
And completely unrelated, the first track on Big Black’s album is about the breaking up of a child exploitation ring. From the point of view of the perpetrators. Which gives you an idea of where the album is going to go, subject wise; wherever it wants to. Don’t let that put you off, though, because it’s not especially explicit from the lyrics that this is what’s going on, and the track is a good one.
As is Kerosene, a brutal and lengthy track about setting oneself on fire because of general ennui and disgust at the world - “Probably come to die in this town”. However, the kerosene is referred to as “she”, so “Kerosene, set me on fire” may not be as literal but more finding an escape from the existential angst of life in a dead-end town through passion. Or, most likely, both.
This kind of adolescent rage at the world is nothing new to punk and post-punk works; where Big Black take it is to use super-fast drum machine beats (a Roland, not a Linn) overlaid with thrumming bass (Dave Riley probably using strumming sometimes to get that really muddy sound) and noise guitars of Steve Albini and Santiago Durani). This isn’t pure thrash all the way through each track, though, there are ebbs and flows, in and out of riffs, sometimes everybody stepping back and providing grace notes and noise effects over the relentless march of the drum machine. It all sounds really modern.
Albini’s vocals are delivered with fuzz and distortion, like Mark E Smith or Karen O, with generally simple and repetitive lyrics, but the fact that they aren’t the growled or shouted style found in hardcore punk to me made the album less of an ordeal – although the music is heavy and deep, dark black, it didn’t evoke the kind of fatigue that other forms of heavy music sometimes do with me.
Does it get a little samey towards the end? Yes, somewhat, but each track is a great bit of superior-quality noise rock. It’s a promising start to 1986 that the music will begin to sound closer to the next decade (and beyond).
Comments
Post a Comment