Notes From The Record Room: Steve Albini (A Review)

I’d like to apply the same level of venomous wit and serrated, bona-fide observation to the news today as Steve Albini would have to any middle-of-the-road and disposable volume of “music” submitted into FM existence by some midlevel guitar chokers and the lack of imagination and taste their label heads exhibited while masking their shortsighted greed as the championing of raw talent.

I’d like to address the unfairness of today when an otherwise unstoppable presence in independent music can hit the proverbial wall, leaving behind a bewildered and confused fanbase whose perspectives on art and music were left forever changed thanks to some extraordinarily loud fucking albums featuring some extraordinarily splintery, primal guitar tones, and a drum sound as distinct as fucking fingerprints.

I want to understand how the author of some of the best rock writing I’ve ever read, engineer of the some of the best albums I’ve ever heard, and speaker of the some of the best commentary I’ve ever listened to can be forever silenced while we’re all perpetually force-fed spoonfuls of inane horseshit to fill our precious time and flatline our irreplaceable brains.

I want to know where I’ll find another unafraid voice, intelligently explicit and coarse while capably articulate and succinct.

I want to air the same dissatisfaction for the news today as Albini had for CD technology and even Steely-fucking-Dan!

And I want my copies of Atomizer and At Action Park to thunder from my stereo, each hairline groove worn away from repeated play, the dial up and the amps distorted and crackling from fatigue.

The death of Steve Albini: ZERO-FUCKING-STARS!

P.S. Fuck Elvis Costello.

Sincerely,
Letters From A Tapehead