On Shellac’s debut album At Action Park, Bob Weston, Steve Albini and Todd Trainer were credited as playing “mass”, “velocity” and “time”. Maybe this was just a throwaway gag on a record whose sleeve also included instructions for “resuscitation from apparent death by electric shock”. But considered alongside the LP’s annotations of materials and production processes, and its specification of the precise speed of rotation (200 degrees per second), it suggested the group had a direct connection to the physics of rock. 

The idiosyncratic credits capture how Shellac redrew the calculus of the rock band. Rather than a power trio of guitar, bass and drums working neatly in harmony, Shellac comprised barely comparable quantities moving in different directions, or existing in different states. Weston, then known mostly in the UK as a mastering engineer for underground rock groups such as Polvo, adds a presence on bass that’s more of a vibrational foundation than a melodic centre. Albini’s guitar in contrast has a laser-like quality which weightlessly cuts the air. Todd Trainer hits his drums with full-blooded arcs of the arm and stick, pounding like he’d just stumbled across strange objects. Unlike many drummers, he seems to drag behind the beat, making you wonder whether he’ll manage to get back to the one in time.

It’s strange to think, but At Action Park felt almost like a disappointment after Shellac’s salvo of inscrutable 7″s. The songs on The Rude Gesture (A Pictorial History) and Uranus were abrupt and half-formed – lingering intros, false endings, pauses – which gave the impression that they were forged by uncontrollable pressures. “Doris” is based around a simple riff moving up and down the guitar neck, from chord shape to chord shape in unpredictable steps, generating a sense of brooding terror. The movement between the so-called verse and chorus is a kind of sickening lurch. “Wingwalker” on the flipside, one of their most memorable songs, is a rolling, hurtling bass riff, over which Albini plays more or less whatever he wants, from beginner’s guitar figures to scouring cyclones of feedback. Shellac’s sense of non-stop anything, accentuated by a 7″ format that suggested snatches of work in progress, gave their music a drama that measured up to the emotional intensity of the lyrics.  

The first time I heard Albini’s guitar was at a busy room at Shellac’s All Tomorrow’s Parties festival at Camber Sands in 2002. His aluminium-necked Travis Bean, plugged into a forbidding industrial-looking amplifier, came through loud and clear in a way qualitatively different to other instruments. Maybe it was the metallic materials, or the oddball Harmonic Percolator effects pedals, but the sensation was of directly channelling the physical motion of the guitar strings. All the familiar paraphernalia of rock, from Marshall amps to the humbuckers on a Gibson Les Paul, seemed weak and compromised next to Shellac, who knew their technical shit and could capture the pure sound of circuitry in motion.

Around the time of discovering Shellac, I was listening to techno, jungle, house and hiphop, track-ist music which harnessed the direct power of digital sound. Shellac were proudly analogue, of course, but for a dance music head, their heavy slabs of vinyl captured the same thrill of tonal experimentation and vibrational energy. When you wanted inspiration for extreme sounds, you could drop the needle on one of Shellac’s records and find a razor sharp piece of feedback like a rave siren, or slab of bass notes like a sound system. 

Albini’s proudly independent ethos, which led him to build studios, search out unusual microphones and use those cool gunslinger guitar straps, meant that Shellac could only ever be an occasional group. They made records or did tours only when it could be fitted easily into the lives of each of the three players. His views on work are like oblique strategies for the soul, anti-matter in a universe full of self-help: “I’ve lived my whole life without having goals, and I think that‘s very valuable, because then I never am in a state of anxiety or dissatisfaction. I never feel I haven’t achieved something. I never feel there is something yet to be accomplished.” The Wire have published a lengthy online interview with the band on their independent MO to accompany their recent cover story, one of the last interviews with the band

So Shellac rarely seemed to build towards anything in particular, and their later albums such as 2007’s Excellent Italian Greyhound and 2014’s Dude Incredible interspersed the familiar tough workouts with only the occasional startling new direction, such as the gnarled electric folk of “Dude Incredible” (Fairport Convention at Electrical Audio) or the epic melancholy of “The End Of Radio”. They were never going to mature or mellow out, but as they aged there were scattered moments of reflection and revelation which ran in parallel to Albini’s own reevaluation of his own moral compass. 

If only that wayward journey, that bunch of friends who travelled together once a decade, could have continued. For me, Shellac never matched the mercurial violence of those early 7”s, just as REM never made another record as strange as Chronic Town, or Public Enemy were never so raw as on Yo! Bum Rush The Show. But I suspect Albini would have enjoyed that bit of disrespect, anyway. 

Image: Steve Albini with Shellac at All Tomorrow’s Parties, Pontins Camber Sands, 2002 (Shannon McClean, YouTube)