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

[#] Atomizer (1986)

Vantablack industrial punk.

Reviewed November 26, 2021

(This is an album that was previously covered on the Rediscovering! Click the link in the table to read my first impressions, or read on for how they might have changed.)

Let's talk "Jordan, Minnesota". Musically, this is Big Black in top form, a repetitive blast of simulated backbeat drumming and industrial guitars that ends in Steve's out of breath screeches—playacting as one of the child rape victims in the Jordan abuse ring scandal. Contrary to popular belief, there were very credible cases of actual molestation that came out of the reports, only torpedoed by an overzealous prosecutor willing to harass kids and encourage salacious testimony. Steve would apologize for this song perpetuating the "falsehood" in time, but even if it was all fake, does that make this any less tacky? It's one thing when Big Black explores taboos in a fictional light. When it's real people involved and done this way, it goes beyond harrowing and simply becomes questionably edgy, absolutely a shame given the intense musical backing.

If you can get past that fucking bleak shadow, though, Atomizer is a blue-hot cracking listen, more so for its sounds than its memorable songs. Big Black took the already repellant napalm punk music they'd been cooking up on their EPs and came up with a batch of somehow even nastier sounds to augment their questionable lyrical preoccupations. "Kerosene" is a six minute odyssey of ringing guitars turning into blowtorches, extolling the virtues of sex and arson combined—and it may be their best song period. "Fists of Love" turns especially aggressive sex atmospheric, and "Bazooka Joe" even features an Albini vocal solo, albeit one encouraging a traumatized war vet to become a contract killer. Appalling lyrical matter, buzzsaw guitars, and drum machine stampedes are the Big Black recipe, and Atomizer about shows the fullest extents those things can get taken, for better and absolutely for worse.

(Atomizer would be reissued on CD as The Rich Man's Eight Track Tape alongside the Heartbeat and Headache singles in 1987. Too short to get their own reviews, Heartbeat features a gnarly cover of the Wire song that handily proves Big Black didn't need nasty lyrics to sound intense alongside two half-baked originals. Headache is largely a sonic retread of earlier material that signalled that Big Black's star was burning out, leading to one more full-length before they disbanded forever. I always thought that was the right move, but having listened through their discography now, I can confidently say that was the right move.)

Essential:	"Big Money", "Kerosene", "Bazooka Joe"
Quintessential:	"Passing Complexion"
Non-Essential:	"Jordan, Minnesota"
Rating:
Further listening:	The Rich Man's Eight Track Tape's Rediscovering entry