or better or worse, we here at Stylus, in all of our autocratic consumer-crit greed, are slaves to timeliness. A record over six months old is often discarded, deemed too old for publication, a relic in the internet age. That's why each week at Stylus, one writer takes a look at an album with the benefit of time. Whether it has been unjustly ignored, unfairly lauded, or misunderstood in some fundamental way, we aim with On Second Thought to provide a fresh look at albums that need it.

Eighty-odd years in and no one's learned a goddamn thing. The music industry continues its quixotic wild goose chase for the acts that rake in the numbers. Bands bend over backward to sign with one of the Five, only to find themselves back on the coffeehouse-and-bar circuit at the end of the month when the flavor's gone. Consumers uncritically acquiesce to outrageously inflated CD prices for records containing barely a single's worth of good material. And outside of this unfortunate paradigm stand minimalist rock triumvirate Shellac, sneering contemptuously and flaunting its immunity to the foolishness. It never touches them, and their music stands as a gripping example of the magic that can happen when industry keeps the fuck out of art.

Shellac are inscrutable to the music industry not only because they don't exist to sell records, but because they do sell in spite of a conspicuous lack of promotion and touring. Of course, even if they never sold a single unit they'd still be recording and playing, simply because they like to--and Shellac is an indulgence. Albini and Weston are highly acclaimed recording engineers and Trainer runs a warehouse, so the band could split up tomorrow and none of the members would skip a beat. Such rarely-paralleled musical freedom coupled with liberal gaps between recorded sessions affords the band the energy to churn out classics like At Action Park, its virgin excursion into bile-spitting and tooth-gnashing.

Now bear in mind lyrical and musical misanthropy has been Albini's stock-in-trade since the days of Big Black, but never before had his instantly recognizable guitar scrapings been backed by such a monolithically locomotive rhythm section as the Weston-Trainer offensive. Fuck your preconceptions and press play--but beware. This is what it sounds like when Andy Gill's guitar is resurrected from Gang of Four, surgically transplanted onto AC/DC-ish hunks of rhythm, and thrown in with unexpected tempo changes and strategically placed negative space. Prepare to be polarized, as you'll either elevate this album to the highest echelons of your collection or sell it back in repulsion.

I wouldn't call the record an acquired taste either; listening to it 50 times isn't likely to change your opinion much if at all. Spindly chargers like "Pull the Cup" would still grate or exhilarate, as the case may be, and the sardonic electricity of "Boche's Dick" and "Il Porno Star" would still abrade just as fiercely. The riffs aren't that complicated for the most part; Albini can knock most of 'em out while flipping the bird in concert. But that does little to mitigate the raw power of "My Black Ass"'s serrated stomp or "Song of the Minerals"'s atonal plod. If you're not ensnared by the first couple minutes, you may as well give up now--the attack doesn't change or abate much throughout the record.

And so, in light of the above intimations, I ask the music biz rhetorically: where is thy sting? Really, the only other band I can think of that's weathered the industry's influence as well is Fugazi, and they're not nearly as fun. Nor was Jehu as confrontational, or Slint as durable, or Caballero as menacing as these three, who comprise arguably the top math/noise combo currently around. And while it could convincingly be argued that they haven't made much progress since 1994, I'd consider that more of a benefit for the fans who return time after time to Shellac for quality three-man noise. As such, everything I've said in this review pretty much pertains to their other releases as well, so don't expect any surprises (except for the interminable drone that kicks off Terraform). If what I've said sounds good to you, you'll probably love them; if not, take your Belle & Sebastian records and get out of my review.