Review Summary: I didn’t notice, your hair is really great.
Life has a way of bringing you down to earth sometimes, doesn’t it? What was supposed to be an elating celebration for this legendary band of sonic visionaries has turned into a bittersweet event. This is a band that has spent the last three decades dishing out some of the most stimulating, thought-provoking and experimental punk records on the market, fronted by one of the scene’s most revered punk legends, Steve Albini. Indeed, prior to
To All Trains, all five Shellac albums have been incredibly consistent, challenging, idiosyncratic, and by design, made to separate the wheat from the chaff, using a stringent and endurance-testing approach to song structure. While it can be said the last few albums have had a large seven-year gap in between them,
To All Trains is the longest we’ve had to wait for a new record, which was abruptly announced for a 17th May release on social media back in March. However, the anticipation for this record came with a heavy heart as, nine days before
To All Trains was set to release, Steve Albini died suddenly of a heart attack in his studio. The funny thing is, given Albini’s unwaveringly humbling personality, coupled with his sardonic quips, the chances are he’d be sneering at this opening paragraph, telling me to shut up about him and start talking about Shellac’s new record, so let’s get on with it.
Without a single song to go off prior to
To All Trains’ release, there was no way of gauging where the record was headed sonically. However, if we’re to go off their track record, the likelihood this was going to be poor was slim; and indeed, this presupposition was correct.
To All Trains is yet another fantastic album that, like all their other albums, feels extremely familiar but has plenty of its own character to make it stand on its own. The most noticeable quality is the album’s brazen, no-nonsense attitude, which cuts out all the long-winded, repetitious songwriting in favour of a more succinct and varied experience. The grooves are as infectious and hypnotic as ever – from “WSOD” with Albini’s bouncy guitar licks and Weston’s descending bassline, to the noodle-y guitar and stomping rhythm section on “Tattoos”. Overall, the album is quintessential Shellac from start to finish, one that displays the band at their most concise and distinguished. Both Albini and Weston provide vocals for the album, and each vocalist provides a different emotional hue that works to its advantage: where Albini is snarky, quippy and holds a mighty weight behind his approach, Weston’s is much airier and benign, adding an additional layer of variety to the songwriting here.
I’d probably go as far to say this is their go-to album for newcomers looking to experience Shellac for the first time. It has all of the band’s greatest qualities: brimming with humour, loaded with distortion and attitude, and it has the usual spread of stink-faced grooves the band are so well known for. Yet, what makes this more accessible over the band’s other albums is its pithy songwriting. This is easily their most balanced record; with a very appealing pace, done in a way that condenses everything they’re known for into these digestible tracks. The longest a song gets on here is just under four-and-a-half-minutes, which is a far cry to the ten minute explorative loops of the past. And frankly, this gambit pays off immensely in the long run. The situation surrounding
To All Trains is unfortunate to put it lightly, but at the very least Shellac have provided one last excellent entry for the fans before Albini’s untimely death. If you’ve never listened to the band before today,
To All Trains essentially cherry picks all of the band’s greatest assets and crafts a lean, moreish and hard-hitting record both fans and newcomers are sure to lap up. The impressive part is the band don’t sacrifice an iota of their experimental nature or abrasive tendencies in testing out these new ideas. While the music doesn’t go above and beyond what we’ve heard from them already, the quality remains steadfast, making
To All Trains one of the sharpest entries in their discography.
