The stages of grief are pretty incredible. I’ve never had to go through it like this, with a friend this close, but I’m starting to wonder if each grief experience follows the same path or is it completely exponential in terms of possibilities. I say this because I feel like I started with the first level but when I moved to the second, the first one still lingers, and now that it has been quite a few months I’ve hit new levels but the old ones are recycled with new insight.
This is of course in reference to my lovely friend Steve Albini who died suddenly of a heart attack in 2024. I won’t look the date up. I don’t need to know the date because I can remember just about every action in my life the day of and after. Why put a number on it.
I hit a new level a week ago. A new appreciation, a new acceptance and coming with it a new bursting into sobs and my wife now familiar with the scenario scooting over to console me. What a lady.
We went to bed on a Saturday evening, mildly buzzed on some wine and weed and I decided to pop on some music with my best pair of headphones while my wife started to doze off in our dark room accentuated by the dollar store glow in the dark stars that bathed us in neon green splash.
I have no idea why, but I decided to pop on Uzeda’s 2006 album Stella. Recorded by Steve. I’ve kind of been avoiding music he’s recorded for a while. I certainly haven’t listened to any of his music.
The music itself is perfection. By 2006 I’m not sure what I had decided about a math rock and from what I remember it was about to start a new age that became comical and dumb, with bands outdoing each other with bleep bloop super compressed drums ding that bell and close that high hat as tight as possible while you switch from 9:4 to 15:2 stinger into 99:98 I dunno. We probably hit the end and it’s possible that the opening track, Wailing, did it. Because all of the legitimate, aspiring giants of the time realized that there was nothing else that could be proven after it. It ended the whole argument of how to construct something complicated and terrifying and open ended and beautiful.
Listening to all three minutes and thirty eight seconds, I don’t know if the bass player ever switches his part. Think Then Comes Dudley if the Jesus Lizard had the balls to just keep going, digging deeper. That’s how heavy.
And as guitarist Agostino slowly builds up, with absolutely terrifying pick slides that are so sharp and unsettling. Followed by a dark simple chord pattern that isn’t as discordant as you may think. Slowly building a fire.
Singer Giovanna Cacciola moves from a distant low moan that just keeps going until you start to notice the build.
The guitar is now shrieking and alerting us. And Giovanna is screaming. She’s louder but still far away.
Here comes the crescendo we’ve waited minutes and the drums and bass FINALLY leave their odd signature groove to hit the part where it all comes together a blues riff from hell?? In an odd meter????? The contrast knocks you on your ass.
Meanwhile Giovanna is having a mental breakdown singing in her own language (I remember an old review of the first Nerves record on Drag City and he mentioned that the best bands have singers that sound like aliens screaming in their own language)
Sorry every one else, this is the best it could ever get.
And somewhere in all of that, it hit me. It isn’t just that this is the pinnacle of the genre, it was that my friend Steve was there to capture it. Because we are hitting a new acceptance. That I didn’t just lose a wonderful friend, but an absolute master of his craft. I know that my good friend Devin Dixon, also suffering a similar pain, brought this up a few weeks ago after listening to an Ex record. Tim Midyett the historian and trustworthy source immediately explained how nobody else could have done that. Captured those guitars and drums the way Steve did.
The thing is, in this case, it is so extra good. Because not only was Steve the best at this, he was working for a group of people he absolutely adored. His love for Agostino and Giovanna was so abundant he would talk about them constantly. Random opportunities, he had to throw it out there with an anecdote to once again shine a light on them with adoration. When I hear this recording, I can tell, it’s not just a Steve recording. Like, you record with Steve you’re gonna get a great product out of him, or at least an honest try. The most honest try. Seriously.
But I could just see him hearing this music and moving around the board with the focus that he saved for very specific situations. Total lock in. You know that he went a little extra because of his love. That first pick slide is the proof. It is too good. It pricks your ear so hard but entices at the same time.
His determination to keeping dynamics as the most important part of the product, the slow build (almost in a way similar to the way I hear X’s Nausea slowly building and building slightly faster and faster and more menacing) is so much heavier than anyone else could have produced. He respects the slow build and doesn’t smash it. Those fucking drums that kick drum holy shit it changes the way I think of a killer kick drum sound and it’s much higher than I thought.
The vocals. The perfect volume and perfect mix of close and room sound.
I assume the only other things I can think of similar would be the Breeders stuff (especially Title TK), TJL and Silkworm. You guys got like, bonus Steve. It’s here. I can hear it.
Also, I’ll bury at the end of this.
I am listening to the record as I write and when I finished writing this up I finally let it move to the next song on Stella What I Meant When I Called Your Name and it dawned on me, that I actually started sobbing during this song.
Specifically a second after 1:27 when you get an absolutely unreal squeal of feedback and it absolutely takes your ear off and then dies off into the sunset as the heaviest riff rises up from hell.
That squeal is the proof. Who else allows that and makes it announce the bomb that’s gonna explode?
SFA