At Action Park by Shellac

At Action Park, Shellac's debut album, came out on Touch and Go in 1994, two years after Steve Albini, bassist Bob Weston and drummer Todd Trainer started the Chicago trio as an informal side project. Albini produced it, and since he and Weston were both recording engineers with a taste for bare analog sound and next to no overdubs, it sounds exactly like three people in a room trying to break it: guitar used for scrape and texture rather than solos, the voice just one more noise in the fray, and a rhythm section churning like a washing machine full of bricks, time signatures bent out of shape on purpose.

Critics loved the punishment, Greg Kot among them. Even the package made a point: a hand-folded sleeve, a made-up map of Action Park, and on the flip side a dry medical text on reviving victims of electric shock, lifted from an old electronics textbook of Weston's. "Crow" is the track that reached the countdowns.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.