Big Black: Atomizer [TOUCH & GO]

Why you'll love it

This remastered 30th anniversary pressing restores "Strange Things," heard on the first pressing alone, and adds an insert and download card. It's Steve Albini's band at full force, and a forerunner of industrial rock.

This edition

• 30th anniversary edition
• Remastered
• Includes "Strange Things"
• Double-sided insert
• Download card included
• Stereo mix

About the album

Big Black had a drum machine, and they credited it on the sleeve as Roland. Steve Albini, Santiago Durango and Dave Riley built their sound around its relentless pulse, with guitars that clang like sheet metal and Albini's voice cutting through it all. Atomizer, their first full-length, was produced by the band with Iain Burgess in Chicago.

"Kerosene" is the centrepiece, a long, wound-up epic about small-town boredom, and "Jordan, Minnesota" and "Bad Houses" turn real Midwestern stories into ferocious noise. "Big Money" had already turned up as a B-side, and the live "Cables" closes side two. Metal Hammer called it a distillation of the band's sonic anguish and endurance tests, which in this corner of the world is high praise. Durango's guitar and Riley's bass hammer away in lockstep with Roland. "Passing Complexion" and "Bazooka Joe" keep the pressure on.

The year after Atomizer, Big Black put out the Headache EP with a sticker that warned buyers it wasn't as good as Atomizer, so don't get your hopes up. Rarely has a band been so helpful about which record to buy first.

Also at Kops: more Big Black on vinyl · browse Punk

Tracklist

Listen

On Touch and Go (cat# TG93), a reissue of the 1986 album.