Big Black

An early morn. The backdrop grey sky. A steamengine whistle. A cement wall. The back of a fence.
The complex pictureplay of faces flickering by. Some of the men have Nosferatu faces.
The piles of records, vinyl mostly, lurking there in spindly rows, so full of vacant promise and really so shiny and beautiful. Reworkings of shiny accelerated tape, wound over on messy spools but catalogued gladly by in the stereo compartments and shiny rows nicely. Piles of CD stacked neatly there too, these carefully-wrought, divinely produced products with their glorious florid packaging and serious workmanship.
The workmanship of vinyl records is especially beautiful, an actual sizeable slab of human ingenuity more lovely than the techno egghead meanness of tiny, grumpy CDs. A shiny, broad LP cover, and a broad, proud disc especially of, say coloured vinyl thin and grooved nicely and with weird messages probably scratched in the vinyl. Ah the beautiful clutter of bleak speakers and smooth audio equipment and your noble LPs all grouped in their collective silence and brotherhood, clustering their vivid, multifarious spines!
Drop a slab of vinyl on that carefully balanced, artfully constructed timetable. Remember Big Black, think how much Robert loved them and had the big nameless glossy poster on his wall. Think of that divine Albini twiddling his knobs in some forsaken studio long ago, creating these weird Big Black albums, all the dark buzz of feedback and unique crunch and interchange of guitars dangerously presumptuous and thundering, but never being clichéd or becoming such a hideous thing as metal.
At first there's the darkness and psychosis of danger and gritting teeth and furious voices on the record, Albini's voice which always sounds pure in anger, "Songs about Fucking" you see in rows of LPs in obscure record shops, with the manga guy on the front sweating and straining in pain or ecstasy. The anonymity and dread seriousness of Big Black, black shiny vinyl laying recumbent on the turntable. The grimness of thin t-shirts and serious eighties noise in their grim expressions. Hissing madness of rumbustious songs, guitars so straining and wheezing that they break forth into psychotic rage, but restrained like the matchless thundering of the drums, always imbued with darkness rattling as the vocals get higher and more clean-throated in pure noise. A slow, sinister cover of "The Model" buzzing out with mean vocals and raw guitar parts instead of clean Kraftwerk keyboards. More dark underground beats and eighties drumming, flash and booming, industrial darkness and facelessness. Wheezing, bursting, bombastic guitars, the bass stands out meanly as if played by someone especially pissed off and isolated, minimal battering of drums. Screaming vocals. Big Black are better than Husker Du or the Pixies for me....