Album’s title speaks for itself

Chicago Post-Punk band Shellac released Dude Incredible on Chicago based independent label, Touch & Go Records last Tuesday.

Dude Incredible is Shellac’s fifth release over the course of their 20-year career, and their first release since 2007s “Excellent Italian Greyhound.” The 33-minute, nine-track LP, features drummer Todd Trainer; bassist and vocalist Bob Weston; and guitarist and vocalist Steve Albini.

The album was recorded in its entirety using analog equipment at Albini’s studio, Electric Audio, in Chicago over sporadic sessions spanning the last seven years.

Here’s where Shellac beats down any other rock band today: they have zero record industry loyalty. They have had absolute freedom to escape the normal trapping of commercial industry garbage, owing to Albini and Weston’s professional prowess (both men worked as engineers on Nirvana’s 1992 album, In Utero).

The title track is the longest song on the album at six minutes and opens the record with a solid, almost bluesy sounding riff. Albini sings several stoic verses that relay a sense of camaraderie and the dynamics of human interaction; spontaneity of travel and what draws people together. And broken into repeating sections of crushing competition as Albini offers a promise; “We will fight you hand-over-hand-over-hand-over-hand.”

The second track Compliant, features Weston on vocals. It features repetitive baselines and savage drumming that intermingles with lyrics, which capture the behavior of someone suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder; following through with their daily rituals to satiate the nagging insistence of their brains.

Track three is You Came In Me, and as you can imagine, it’s a straightforward song about intercourse with an almost uncanny Mothers of Invention feel. Beyond being lewd or sophomoric, however, Albini uses biting satire to write the lyrics from a woman’s perspective and pulls no punches: the song itself is two minutes long.

The fourth song, Riding Bikes, has an ear pleasing progression on the bass and an almost Ennio Morricone feel when Albini’s guitar finally comes in. Albini speaks of forgotten times in every male’s adolescence; riding bikes around with other boys and committing petty acts of vandalism.  In the reviewers opinion; it’s the best track on the album.

Fifth is All The Surveyors, which Albini suggested in an interview with Canadian podcast host Vish Khanna, is about how several of the founding fathers were surveyors. It opens with an iconoclastic chorus blessing off the king of England, followed by more heavy riffs and bird noises, moving into lyrics about satellites and surveillance.

The sixth track is The People’s Microphone, an instrumental that Albini alludes to in the aforementioned interview as being about Occupy Wall Street.

The seventh song, Gary, has lyrics by T-Bone Slim published in a book of communist folk songs from the early twentieth century.  The song is about a steel magnate in Gary, Indiana, for which the town was named.  It has a slow, almost waltz feeling, full of swooping metallic tremolos while Albini wails in lament.

Song eight is Mayor/Surveyor, a quick tempo instrumental and has an almost mathrock progressive sound to it.

The last song on the album is Surveyors.  It just happens that the b-side carries an inadvertent Surveyor theme, which Albini has sworn is coincidental.  Weston takes vocal duties on this track and it’s the only song which Albini uses heavy distortion on his guitar.  The time signature is driving and the breakdowns are so subtle that you aren’t aware that they’re breakdowns.

It’s recommended that you listen to a copy of this album on vinyl to get a feeling for Albini and Weston’s ability to craft a stereophonic masterpiece and mix it just as well. You can hear most of the guitar panning left, drums in the middle, and bass on the right.

On first listen, I could almost swear that Shellac was performing a show in front of me, and all I can say about this record is “Dude, Incredible.”