BIG BLACK - ATOMIZER

it's a sign of the times when you 'google' BIG BLACK and the first image is of some fat rapper and a skinny white skateboarder. not sure where it all went wrong. Steve Albini's 'that was then this is now' attitude doesn't help. Steve is sat on the kind of musical history that anyone in their right mind would shoot themselves in the cock to whore out. But no. No remastering, no posthumous live albums, demo's or unreleased material. It all ends with the final chords of 'Bombastic Outro' form 'Songs About Fucking'....Well okay 'Pigpile'.

Anyway, now Steve's got the often disapointing SHELLAC and his seemingly wayward producing career and he's made it clear he doesn't need me or any one else stuck in 1986 to tell him it should be otherwise. Fact remains BIG BLACK top my list of bands I would do anything to see live.

I came to Big Black fairly late in the day and it would have been 1991/2 by the time I bought the Blast First re-issue of this. It was from Nottingham's mighty Selectadisc, back when they pretty much owned that entire street with a singles shop at one end and the collossal three story enormo-store at the other. Then a trip to Nottingham was a proper twice yearly treat: Endless wandering, fish and chips somewhere a pint or two, some record shopping ending at Selectadisc and then a few happy hour cocktails at the now defunct Old Orleans. I remember carefully slipping the insert out of the sleeve and feverishly reading the sleevenotes while sipping from a particularly gay looking, long strawed and umbrella stuffed cocktail. No doubt the epitomy of the end consumer the band had envisaged.

Anyway, I went home listened to it and I'm still listening to it, my copy is battered and fucked from late night scream alongs and early morning wake up calls. it's survived a million cullings and will no doubt still be there in however many more years. It's just such a fucking solid album, even if it does end on a random live version of 'Cables'. It's one of those records that you can never listen to loud enough, the kind of record that they haven't built a stereo powerful enough to fully accomodate yet. The thing is fucking artillery, I have to believe that it paid no small part in at least one of the two Iraqi wars.


To this day, the only song that I am garanteed to dance to on a night out is 'Kerosene'.