Wednesday 5 June 2019

Shellac - 1000 Hurts (2000)


'What the hell is that?' my wife chuckled from the other room as I was listening, and I didn't really have a reply aside from simply naming the artist, which probably wouldn't have answered the question. I assume it was kill him, just fucking kill him over and over which caught her attention, that being the refrain of Prayer to God, the first song on side one.
To the one true God above, here is my prayer,
Not the first you've heard, but the first I wrote.
Not the first, but the others were a long time ago.
There are two people here, and I want you to kill them.

It's a song about a guy who has discovered that his wife is having an affair; except, it isn't. It's about the impotent rage of the guy, helpless and overwhelmed by something too terrible to consider, which is why he's praying, asking a God in whom he probably doesn't believe to kill the fuckers because it seems as good a solution as any. I guess this sort of thing has been a fairly common feature of Albini's lyrics, namely the stunted fury of the little guy, like a self-portrait of an angry Robert Crumb, eyes bulging, sweat on his brow, shitty crumpled suit and his fist shaking at the sky - either for the piano which has just been pushed from the top of a tall building and which is about to crush him in the most stupid way imaginable, or at an unjust and uncaring universe. This guy comes back again and again, too smart for his own good, forever the subject of indignity, doomed.

Hey man... I wanna have a fight with you,
Regardless of my feelings on the subject
it appears that I am going to.

Weirdly, I find that this folksy small town focus reminds me a little of the Talking Heads back before they went all world music, and it's probably why Shellac works so well, or at least works a whole lot better than simpler, angrier stuff recorded by lesser bands. The strangeness of the material also helps, the song about arranging the numbers in a different order, for example. It makes no fucking sense, and yet has an emotional impact for no reason I can quite identify beyond qualifying as the cogitation of someone with problems.

The production shouldn't even require an introduction at this point - finely crafted and at least as powerful as being right in the same room as the band, maybe even in the same room as the guy asking God to kill his wife or the one who wants a fight. This is music crafted - rather than merely played - for the sake of music, for the appreciation of something beautiful, or beautiful by its own awful terms - no shortcuts, no short hand, no additives, no artificial flavouring.

Shellac are amazing.

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