10. Shellac :: 1000 Hurts (2000)

“Prayer to God” is not just the best song on 1000 Hurts, nor is it simply the best Shellac song, nor is it just the best song Albini ever recorded—it’s, like, the best song, period. Each word precision-placed textually and the music a lumbering monstrosity, the track incinerates on impact, a hydrogen bomb almost Faulkneresque in its sparse severity. If that makes any sense. Which it shouldn’t: this is family-killin’ music. What starts as a matricidal daydream wanders quickly from the specifics of her dispatch (“Where her garments come together / Where I used to lay my face”) into a much more palpable, visceral bloodlust. The tipping point, of course, is the narrators’ father, all actual fucking anger and an amen, a mantra without a trace of wit or humor, just, like: “Kill him! Just fucking kill him!”

It’s some serious shit. On its own, “Prayer to God” reasserts Rock Music as something dangerous and real, like a stranger in the room with a knife. Within the context of Shellac’s 1000 Hurts, it thunders a chord of antipathy that resounds through the remainder of the record in tones snarky, brutish, and perverse. The album is sonically definitive of the Albini sound, and the music seems structured specifically to take advantage of this. Hence the alternate chunk and snarl of “Ghosts,” the cavernous stretch between high- and low-end on “New Number Order,” the first minute of “Squirrel Song” and the razor-wire bass line that stretches taught over it before the bloodspray chorus. Pressed on vinyl dark and heavy like light things never existed, form meets function, and Albini’s big fuck-you sound finds its near-perfect distillation.

Clayton Purdom

Or I could tell you about her songwriting. I can get fancy and say something like, “Faulknerian in scope, but like Hemingway in execution”

DrAwkward wrote:I thought Steve doesn't produce records.

DrAwkward wrote:I thought Steve doesn't produce records.