Topic: Steve Albini 1962-2024

[Sheer Magnetism]

Yeah, he deserves his own thread. A musical giant up there with the best producers of his age, and that's before you get on to Shellac and the rest of his bands. Feels like a huge loss.

[Jean Girard]

Genuinely can't believe he's gone. RIP.

I'm a little younger than you 2 above ^  Been trying to count the number of times I've seen Shellac though - maybe 12-14 times since 1999 - was really hoping to see them this summer too.

Then you get into all the albums he's worked on and the services he's provided to the underground.  Shocked and gutted. What a guy - one of the greatest. That post during covid where he was genuinely contrite over lots of edgelord things he said and did in the 80s and 90s.... The Nirvana letter.... The weird double life as a poker player.... Just someone of the highest intellect and integrity. 

The world has lost another good one.

Posted already in the other thread - but agree he deserves a thread of his own.  Some great memories and quotes going round the group chats - mostly from gigs. His opinion on Oasis was hilarious, was reminded of it earlier by Filler.

We were on tour in England when that album was released and we made it to number two in the Indie Chart. What surprised me was that number one was a band called Oasis who I was unfamiliar with because I was an American and Americans didn't know anything about Oasis. While we were on tour, I saw a television interview with one of the brothers in Oasis. I don't know which one. He was going on about how if he was a kid and he heard this band Oasis, they would be his favourite fucking band. They were so fucking exciting, he couldn't believe how fucking incredible this band was. He was in the best fucking band there ever was and if he wasn't in the band then Oasis would be his favourite band because they were so far ahead of everybody else and so much more powerful and exciting. I thought, "Fuck. If a dude in the band is going off about how they blow him away, I really want to hear this band."



Then they followed that interview with filmed footage of that band playing a bunch of songs in concert for twenty minutes or something and I'll assume you know what Oasis sounds like. It was fucking horrible. It's just the most trivial, whiny reiteration of the lowest denominator of English rock and pop clichés. Don't get me wrong, bearing in mind my profession, I have heard worse music. But the dissonance between this guy's enthusiasm for the band that he was describing in the interview, which sounded like a band I would fucking love, and then the actual [starts impersonating the signature Gallagher vocal bleat] "aah-eee-yaaaah" of it. The dissonance was just stunning. It was like a guy talking about how impressive this bodybuilder was and then out trots a toddler infant.

The more I was exposed to Oasis, the more I started to see that Oasis were part of the general celebrity culture rather than being specifically guys in a band. Maybe it doesn't now but back then music had a different function in England. It was part of the general spectrum of celebrity. In America, rock bands and celebrities were two different things. Oasis didn't resonate in the US because all we were exposed to was their music which was trivial. We didn't have the luxury of the gossip, scandals and all that sort of stuff.

From this Interview in The Quietus https://thequietus.com/articles/22952-shellac-steve-albini-interview

[Trump's tiny tiny hands]

Staggered by this news. Just look at his body of work, it’s incredible. Shellac live were fantastic. A big loss RIP

[jackh]

An icon in his field. Produced some of my absolute favourites.

[elbow]

Not the most upstanding of humans, he's said some very shady things in the past.