COURTESY OF TOUCH AND GO RECORDS Ahoy there! Steve Albini, standing, and his mates are a-comin'.
A good Shellac’n
Take a noisome band from Chicago with a bunch of indie cred, put them in a newly refurbished room in one of the more colorful bars Downtown, and you've got Shellac at Club Pauahi.
Shellac
Where: Galaxy Room, Club Pauahi, Fort Street Mall
When: 8 p.m. today and tomorrow
Tickets: $9
Call: 255-7040
Since the early 1990s, this minimalist hard rock trio has been known to create "a pleasing racket," and has one great album to its credit, '94's "At Action Park" on the Touch and Go label. The band has released albums sporadically every two to five years -- which doesn't exactly help keep them in the public eye. But Shellac is also known for one of its more visible band members, the bespectacled Steve Albini, who's made his name as a prolific recording studio engineer, based out of his Electrical Audio space in Chi-town.
When he's not the guitarist/vocalist for Shellac, Albini has engineered and sort-of-produced a variety of acts like The Pixies, PJ Harvey, The Breeders, Bush, the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and, most infamously, Nirvana. His work on their '93 sophomore album "In Utero" was widely discussed in the music press, particularly when it was taken out of his hands by the band's corporate label because it wasn't "commercial" sounding enough.
That's because Albini is known to help cultivate a rawer and less polished sound in the studio, making any band he records sound that more immediately exciting.
Case in point: Cheap Trick. Albini has occasionally worked with the veteran pop-rock band in the studio in recent years. You can even hear some of his work on several tracks on the band's newest album "Special One."
"They're basically remnants from a long, extended session we did," he said in a post-midnight phone interview from his studio last weekend. He and the band also recorded a longtime pet project of the band's, a more raucous version of their 1977 sophomore album "In Color," which may (or, likely, may not) see the light of day.
Albini finds a band like Cheap Trick still so musically relevant and inspirational, that he and his bandmates -- bassist/vocalist Bob Weston and drummer Todd Trainer -- chose them, along with a formidable bunch of fringe, independent bands, to perform at the important annual All Tomorrow's Parties festival in the U.K. last year. Shellac will be involved again in next year's spring festival, along with Belle and Sebastian, and Mogwai, as curators past and present pick their lineups for each day of the festival.
SHELLAC ORIGINALLY started as a duo of Albini and Trainer. Weston, who had known both for a long time beforehand, due to his membership in the indie band Volcano Suns, found that "Steve and I got along engineering-wise and he hired me as a maintenance technician. Then he later asked me to 'try playing bass with us,' and that's how it ended up.
"The guys I used to play with, when they heard me in Shellac, they had a hard time believing it was actually me. But it's still me -- I just play what sounds right. I hear what the guitar and drummer are playing and I play what seems appropriate. But it's weird to think about your own band, because people often have really different ideas of what you are. We just sorta think of ourselves as a stripped-down, three-piece rock band.
"We play both pretty aggressive, hard rock, but some of the segments are quiet and pretty, a feeling of open spaces, so we're not necessarily fast. Steve and I both sing -- or yell, as the case may be. It makes up for a good, cathartic release for us. It's fun to scream or play loud music. People sometimes have the impression that we're angry and upset, but actually we find it funny. We're always trying to crack each other up. So it's funny in a weird, twisted and absurdist way."
Both Albini and Weston think of Shellac as a hands-on, self-managed side project that occurs whenever it feels right.
"We've always functioned using the collective and experimental approach," Albini said. "Not one person is dominant. What's nice about that is it prevents anyone from feeling overwhelmed by another. Anybody can come up with a good idea."
"We've always toured extremely sporadic," Weston said, "whenever we can sync up our busy work schedules. We're in the lucky position where we don't feel a requirement to tour, yet folks want to see us usually."
THE BAND'S Hawaii gig came about because they had some ticket vouchers that had to be used before the end of the month, so, to take advantage of the free tickets, "it made the best sense to come and play in Hawaii, and we're going to lose a little money instead of a lot."
The tradeoff, of course, being that everyone (including their soundman) and their significant others will enjoy a brief stay in the islands. Albini said he and his Honolulu-born girlfriend were briefly here during the summer, retracing her favorite haunts like the North Shore during her early childhood as part of a Marine-stationed family.
Weston and his wife honeymooned on Kauai four years ago, but remembers first being here at the age of 14, playing trumpet in the American Legion marching band from Waltham, Mass.
"I remember having a blast here back then," he said, "even though I felt I almost got killed being flipped around in the surf at Sandy Beach." But he plans to relearn his long-dormant surfing skills -- albeit at a slower pace at Bellows in Waimanalo.
In his phone call from North Carolina (where he was working as an engineer for the touring version of the popular National Public Radio current affairs quiz show "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me"), Weston said that Shellac's first tour ever was through Japan, Australia and New Zealand. "We had never played live before, and since there were such high expectations due to Steve's work in the U.S., we decided to start elsewhere. That way, it was not as insane and we wouldn't be under close scrutiny. It was a good way to get our sea legs, as it were."
THE GUYS make it a point to at least do some live gigs every year in unconventional places, "every couple of months for a small, intense amount of weekends.
"We don't do two-month-long tours. Besides, we're older now and it's not that fun going from city to city, sitting together in a van, even though doing the shows are still fun. We only take trips that are interesting."
"We improvise our sets every night," Albini said. "Someone could shout out a title or start up a song, and the other two will catch up.
"The whole reason of doing it is that something interesting could happen at the spur of the moment. And whether we play in front of five or 500 people, it's still cool when it's happening on stage."
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