Where bought? If I had to guess I'd say Piccadilly Records in Manchester. I associate 'acquiring loud records that have something to do with Steve Albini' with living in Manchester, and remember buying At Action Park by Shellac from the same place (subsequently sold).
Haven't heard this in quite a while and was ready to possibly accept that the days where I wanted to listen to a monolithic combination of skinny whiteboy rage over cheese-wire strung guitar and pounding drum machine beats were long behind me.
The days where that was a formula for success seem so long ago; a heady era of post-university dropout miasma that I seem to have forgotten much about. My early 20s were horrible; a waste. I don't really remember who I was or how I did anything. A mulch of grey minutes and mis-spent everything. Whatever soundtracked it was probably testament to apathy.
I would have bought this because of the chapter in Our Band Could Be Your Life. Each band documented in a chapter in that tome became something I'd latch onto; Big Black are portrayed as the 80s equivalent of anti-woke squares, being provocative as a means to generate some feeling in a world that prevents them from having any. I hate that I could relate, but I could relate.
Turns out that I still very much like this and the music is so undeniable in parts that whatever recherche sentiments come out I can ignore. The lyrical conceit of 'Jordan, Minnesota' (about a town that allegedly was a paedophile ring) is a bit of a shocker, but the rest from my cursory engagement feel like portraiture from the dark side of life. Some of it is accidentally pathetic in a way that feels true ("I tell myself I will not go / Even as I drive there").
What really appeals is how the recording, by Ian Burgess, is kind of the opposite of where Albini would go. Everything sounds slightly baked together, a machine of various parts that are going haywire in a claustrophobic room. For much of my life I would fetishise that roomy 'big drum' Albini production, though now I mostly think it inappropriate and not great for rock music. On Atomizer the vibe is more bedroom, more personal. It's the songs that were worked at and not the recording, in the best possible sense.
Side A is great beyond the opening mis-step; 'Passing Complexion' has a great rapid harmonic-run melody and 'Kerosene' is probably their biggest and best song, all tension leading up to a world-class payoff. Side B has a couple of portraits of domestic abusers - 'Fists of Love' doesn't quite add up and sounds weirdly conventional, but 'Stinking Drunk' is frantic rocking Big Black at their best. The teutonic swagger of 'Strange Things' is a fun one too.
So this is good, it turns out. That said another home might appreciate it more. Wait and see.
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