Word: albini
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Steve Albini has had a significant influence on rock music. He was in a band that influenced a lot of other bands. He produced lots of those bands. If you live in America, you've heard one of these bands. But Albini is a polarizing figure; not all agree that his influence is salutary. Most of this irritation stems from two things: his stringent demands for integrity in music and his own apparent violations of the edicts he lays down. Also, he's probably the most arrogant guy on the planet...
...album fumbles when it overreaches. Most High, a rocker that's meant to evoke the sounds of the Middle East, lacks a focus. And the album's finale, the raving Sons of Freedom, is a discordant, fuzzed-out mess. The disc was recorded and mixed by Steve Albini--he also worked on Nirvana's album In Utero--and his personal love for noise rock comes through too strongly here. Page and Plant are better off when they follow their own, time-tested instincts...
...everyone is plugged into the Unplugged sound. Steve Albini, the combative producer of Nirvana's last studio album, In Utero, says record companies have seized on Unplugged as a way of repackaging old, previously recorded material. Already own the original? Now buy the unplugged version. "From an artistic standpoint, it's a total joke," says Albini. "You take bands that are fundamentally electric-rock bands and put acoustic guitars in their hands and make them do a pantomime of a front-porch performance. It's not an authentic reading of that music at all. It's like watching a water...
...each other's throats--a two-chord, thumping stomp, say, and its natural enemy, a spiraling, self-involved vocal line--to team up and make nice. And, like Dr. Doolittle, GBV seems out of place in a world that includes compact discs, cable TV, Ministry and Steve Albini...
...friendly tang. The latter song is the album's most accessible, powering along at moderate rock speed and conjuring images of emotional entrapment: "I've been locked inside your heart-shaped box for a week . . . I was drawn into your magnet tar pit trap." In contrast, many of the Albini pieces sound ravaged, almost ruined; but as with buried treasures, there are rewards for persistence and exploration. If you listen repeatedly to such sonically explosive songs as Serve the Servants and Pennyroyal Tea, the structure of each gradually becomes clear, and melodies surface...