The old five-point scale has been retired in favor of just rating stuff 1-10, which allows me a much more nuanced final rating. Still don't take it that seriously. Most of these come from my own collection, so the grades skew rather high. Your results may vary if you send me stuff to review.

Each album is given three Essential tracks, my personal favorites, regardless of how weird and inconsequential they are. The Quintessential pick is the one I think best represents the album as a whole, so you can try one song instead of a whole album of songs. Non-Essential picks range from merely disappointing to outright unlistenable.

Big Black

[#] Racer-X (1985)

Obstinate, ostentatious, funky? Huh.

Reviewed February 7, 2025

It's really a three-way toss-up between "Cables"' sheet metal ambience, "Racer-X"'s throbbing bass and drum machine bombast, and "Jordan, Minnesota"'s harrowing wails for Big Black's most intense first minute. I may still give it to "Racer-X". Skeletal and stabbing, Steve's vocals about how fuckin' cool Rex from Speed Racer really is mixed way down low, it's about as monolithic as anything the band has ever done. If Racer-X isn't as uniformly electrifying as Bulldozer (mostly it sounds a bit dull in the mix), it's still damn good, and a useful document of their continued development as a band in sound, approach, and their appreciation for making a classic song Bigger and Blacker.

There's a sorta kinetic funk energy to Big Black's galvanized sound this time around, as they make the drum machine swing on "Deep Six" and call-and-response their glass shard guitars on "Sleep!". Roland 1.0 (a TR-606) is replaced by Roland 2.0 (an E-Mu Drumulator a la "Shout"), and that's just plain an upgrade, if I'm honest. Lyrically, Big Black still deal in depravity as handily as before, whether that's through portraying a shittalking scumbag trucker who refers to himself as "God's gift to women", accusing the English of incest, or covering a James Brown tune. Hey, how would you end this thing off?

Essential:	"Racer-X", "The Ugly American", "Sleep!"
Quintessential:	"Deep Six"
Non-Essential:	"The Big Payback"
Rating:
Further listening:	Download from Big Black's Bandcamp