Tad - Quick and Dirty (2018)

Record Store Day fills me with cynicism. I've always listened to record albums because that's my preferred medium, so I don't need a special day. I collect record albums because I like music, not for the sake of being a collector, and anyone who ever used the term vinyls as a plural noun can go fuck themselves. A few Record Store Days back, they issued an exclusive double album of Devo live in Seattle, and because I fucking love Devo, I had to have it. I knew Hogwild would open at nine so I got there at seven, and even then found myself stood behind a hundred or so teenagers. The queuing itself wasn't bad. The only other person over thirty was queuing directly behind me. He was after something or other by Wire and told me he loved all the English bands of that era. He also told me that he used to live in Mexico City but had come back to San Antonio because he was tired of getting kidnapped, so it was an interesting conversation. Two hours later, the doors opened, and by the time I made it in, there was no Devo live double album to be had because apparently they hadn't even ordered the fucker; and yet copies were quite naturally already for sale on eBay and Discogs at extortionate prices, so I wasn't very happy about that.

This time I forgot about Record Store Day, despite having read that there would be a Tad album amongst all the usual worthless exclusives - Barry Manilow in red vinyl and the like. I guess I'd subconsciously resigned myself to being unable to get hold of a copy, and typically it was going for twice the price on Discogs that same afternoon; but I dutifully trudged along to the store next day, just in case, and fuck me…

Quick and Dirty is one side studio material and one side live, and the studio material is previously unheard, half of what we may as well call a lost Tad album - which is a very exciting thing indeed. It's been a while since I saw Busted Circuits and Ringing Ears so I have only a vague impression of how the band just kind of dissolved following a series of kicks in the proverbial teeth, and I'm not even sure I was aware they were still enough of a concern to have recorded the six newly unearthed tracks in 1999.

Tad, for the uninitiated, were how Joy Division would have sounded had they grown up in rural American woodland with only a job at the sawmill to look forward to - much harder to kill, more honest about the enduring influence of Black Sabbath, and numerous shitloads heavier. In fact Tad were pretty much the heaviest thing ever. The music speaks of rural horror, boredom, loathing, and shitty deeds undertaken for the sake of maintaining sanity, all of which contrasts with something quite vulnerable at the heart of the storm. Musically it's concrete blocks of grinding sound pinned together at bizarre mathematical angles, yet pinned together by human craft and muscle rather than engineering. There's a mechanistic quality in the relentless advance of these rhythms, born not from machines but from those brutalised by their own lives; or it makes Godflesh sound like the Sundays, if you prefer.

The six new tracks neatly fill a gap between Oppenheimer's Pretty Nightmare and the stuff Doyle recorded with Hog Molly a year or so later. Hog Molly chugged a little harder with less contrast in evidence, and were lyrically more single-minded, songs often relying on the repetition of innocuous phrases posing more questions than were answered; which can be heard here on Mummified Cop and others blending with the suggestion of melancholia and melody I assume must have come from Kurt Danielson.

I'm not usually wild about live albums, not even Tad's Live Alien Broadcasts which is decent but, bizarrely, somehow fails to invoke the raw energy of their studio recordings; so it's nice that the live side of Quick and Dirty really captures them, huge, crushing, terrifying, sweaty and probably a bit on the aromatic side, but still nailing it all down with absolute precision, and nothing lost to the sludge.

Quick and Dirty has made me very happy, so I suppose I'm going to have to concede the point that one good thing has come out of Record Store Day.

Shellac at Action Park (1994)

I've just noticed that Shellac have now been going longer than those acts I once regarded as peddlers of dinosaur rock back when that suddenly seemed like a thing, and this is weird because I've had this album for most of those twenty plus years and it feels as though I'm only just beginning to understand it. This was either a birthday or Christmas present from my friend Andrew, the one who pegged it, and is thus yet another example of him having introduced me to something I now consider essential listening. Oddly, I found Action Park a little impenetrable at the time - more or less a series of angular riffs and scratching noises scored to a pounding drum rhythm; yet the more I played it, the more its power came to the fore.

People have the wrong idea about Steve Albini, assuming him to be some sort of bloody minded lo-fi figurehead, a man who won't rest until everything has been reduced to a wax cylinder recorded with a microphone made out of old fag papers and knicker elastic. Rather it's the case that he's trying to get to the beauty of the instruments as they sound without all the reverb and chorus and horseshit, none of which are strictly necessary unless you have something to hide - a complete dearth of ideas for example. This isn't to say that the very idea of the studio as instrument is always the province of shitehawks, only that other flavours are available, or at least that they should be.

Albini's musical asceticism extends to the album as object, in this case an object which looks as though it's been purchased from a wooden display box on the counter of a hardware store, and specifically the kind of family owned hardware store tended by a man with strong opinions on possums and raccoons. The music also has a bit of a hardware store feel to it, certainly something involving hammers and sore thumbs. Yet none of this is really quite novelty - some cutesy exercise in nostalgia or punk rock as a Hal Roach production - so much as a reaffirmation of the sheer power of music as visceral and human. Those scratchy riffs and weird, harsh chords executed with the sort of precision timing by which one might operate a lathe or a band saw all slot together to form an almost sculptural whole of complex patterns founded in something surprisingly simple. The drums pound, the bass growls, Albini gives himself a sore throat, and there isn't even standard issue heavy metal distortion on this album, yet it makes Physical Graffiti sound like the Sundays. Steve Albini has made some great records, but this one makes everything which preceded it sound tame.