Watch footage of the band’s final show in Seattle and you might spot a young Kurt Cobain in the audience as the legend goes, he left the show with a chunk of Albini’s smashed guitar as a keepsake. Yet as uncompromising as Songs About Fucking is, the distance between Big Black and the mainstream would soon shrink.
Albini and Santiago Durango’s dueling guitars buzz like metal against metal (not least because they used custom-made metal guitar picks), their Roland drum machine throbs with cold precision, and Albini’s yelp alternates between coiled and unhinged. Such extreme subject matter demands equally extreme music-and by the end of their six-year run, Big Black were more than up to the task. Save for Albini’s occasional bursts of black humor, the album is unrelenting as it plumbs the depths of depravity a more accurate title might have been Songs About Cruelty. When sex does appear in these songs, it’s usually as a means of getting at something darker, like perversion, domination, or violence. Frontman Steve Albini actually covers a wide range of unusual topics on Big Black’s second and final industrial noise-punk album: grotesque execution methods, a psychedelic fungus, cats. Like most things with Big Black, the title Songs About Fucking is something of a sick joke. The fast-moving nature of club music means that today, Raw Like Sushi sounds both incredibly of its time and also strangely modern in its omnivorous outlook, while the razor-sharp observational songwriting on “Manchild”-one of the best songs ever to capture that sinking feeling that life isn’t turning out how you imagined it-ensures its immortality. Particularly irksome for Madonna, probably, was the fact that “Buffalo Stance” effectively beat her at her own game, using the modish club sounds of hip-hop and house to forge pop music that was brazenly cool, instantly memorable, and utterly authoritative.Ĭherry’s debut album, Raw Like Sushi, which followed in 1989, took a similar approach, plucking from the ’80s club pantheon of new jack swing, freestyle, and go-go to create an audacious global pop fusion that made Cherry’s competitors look like tar-ridden dinosaurs. –Louis Pattisonįor a few months in 1988, as Neneh Cherry ’s debut single “Buffalo Stance” climbed the global charts, it looked like Madonna might have a serious competitor to her pop throne. One highlight is the penultimate “Spying Glass,” which Andy would later reprise on Massive Attack’s 1994 LP Protection, drawing out its themes of paranoia and surveillance. The record can be sonically adventurous-on “Stop the Fuss,” a blanket of echo pushes the bass and drums to the point on disintegration-but you’re gripped tight throughout by Andy’s voice: sweet, sinuous, reflecting on greed, division and the Rasta life. Under the guidance of founder Lloyd “Bullwackie” Barnes, Wackies had become a home for skulking heavyweight dub of the first order. But Dance Hall Style has a special alchemy.
#3RD BASS THE CACTUS ALBUM SONGS FULL#
Recorded at Wackies, a damp basement studio in the Bronx, it was just six songs long, and some of those had already lived a full life Andy himself had recorded “Lonely Woman” with producer Derrick Harriott a decade earlier, while “Cuss Cuss” was a cover of a track released by rocksteady stalwart Lloyd Robinson back in 1968. On paper, at least, there’s no reason it should stand out as a classic. Horace Andy had been a prolific recording artist for some 15 years, cutting discs for Studio One and the dub pioneer Bunny Lee, before he made Dance Hall Style.
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