Big’n – End Comes Too Soon

Computer Students™

It seems to be a sweet period for those lovers of ’90s American dark guitar rock for not only have we had a new Jesus Lizard album after a twenty-six-year hiatus, but their near neighbours and Steve Albini collaborators Big’n have released their first long player in nearly three decades, and boy what a cracker it is.

Although there was an EP of new material back in 2018, they appear to have lost none of their wilfulness, ferocity and precision in the intervening period. With most of the original line-up, these fifteen tracks are not about looking back, but about pushing an already outstanding legacy forward with fresh ideas, enthusiasm and power.

Like the previous releases, although it runs to fifteen tracks, the longer and more exploratory pieces are interspersed with more of their “XMSN” transmissions; snippets that are usually just thirty seconds or so in length and they feel like ideas or sketches, little palate cleansers that only go to highlight the intensity of the main event. A four-piece of guitar, bass drums and voice, Big’n manage to surf a raft of tension throughout the album, building the songs up with a clarity of vision and a purity of production that enables the instruments to slice through the speakers and straight for your jugular. As for the voice, well you can’t help but worry about the things that William Akins has seen.

If anything, the vocals are as sharp as the guitars and mete out a hysteria that is hard to ignore, but is often pummeled by the sheer attack of the rest of the group. You feel the heft of Brian Wnukowski‘s drum strikes and imagine the sweat pooling as he unleashes his battering ram rhythms over the most sinuous of bass lines. Amongst this, the guitar slashes carefully but mercilessly and the voice circles it all like a tortured soul.

The guitar comes on like an electric carving knife, the simple but blinding riffs revelling in their purity. There is something about the sound of the bass and guitar that is shared with Shellac. It is like they have happened upon the ultimate sound for that instrument and Big’n push this for all it’s worth. They understand the desire for obsessive repetition in words and sound as a means of convincing the listener and it is almost a visceral thing; you kind of want to wrap it around you, not for comfort but just because you need to be close to it, that sense of momentum and the feral roar straddling the surface.

It is always good to hear feedback opening a song while others may lumber with dark intent that is hard to ignore, the voice partly hidden, peaking out from beneath the wheels of the passing juggernaut. In other places everything feels close up to the mic, the instruments stunted somehow, their bluster subdued as the voice needles suggestively. The wild intensity that they purvey is addictive and it is easy to be swept away by that, but what I found interesting is that generally it is only the drums that extemporise while the guitar and bass just slay.

Considering the familiarity of the ingredients, it is fascinating how diverse the end results are, with each track inhabiting its own little universe. Some of that may be down to the wild delivery of the vocals, but it just never seems to grow old. A slight change of tone and tempo, a fresh, jaundiced perspective and we are off to the races, lurching drunkenly or slowing things down and just for a second shedding light on a little space. Towards the end, a guitar riff descends into feedback and dark words draw a veil over a journey that is over too soon.

Let us hope that the re-invigorated line-up feel that some of the “XMSN” pieces are worthy of fleshing out into actual songs and we could see another album in the not too distant future; but for the moment, this is essential. Computer Students™ have only released a handful of things in the last six or seven years of the label’s existence, and what they do release are things of beauty with extraordinary attention to detail. End Comes Too Soon sits well within the catalogue and long may both Big’n and Computer Students continue.

-Mr Olivetti-