With all the readily available technology for making music, there is still something exceedingly simple about the notion of a power trio playing instruments before an audience. Shellac frontman and celebrated rock-snob Steve Albini agrees; he prefers music handcrafted and raw, and sneers at what he feels is the manufactured nature of “club culture” whenever he’s asked. And while club culture has so thoroughly won the war against rock – at least in terms of audience size and influence – that it’s almost quaint when a rock musician redraws the tired old battle lines.

Yet Albini backs his talk up with performance. Shellac played at SPACE Gallery on Thursday evening and used their three instruments to generate a white-knuckled, exhilarating experience.

However, the common notion of Shellac as a “minimalist” band is overstated. Minimalism involves stripping components down to their most basic core. Shellac does the opposite: They start with what is, on the surface, very few components (a guitar, a bass guitar and a drumkit) and eke everything they possibly can out of these instruments. As befitting a band that boasts two recording engineers (bassist Bob Weston and Albini, who most famously worked on Nirvana’s “In Utero”), the microphones were meticulously positioned around the drum kit and fidgeted with throughout the performance. Custom-built amps rested atop the speakers, looking like something from a 1960s “Dr. Who” episode.

The result was as clean a sound as you’ll ever hear in a rock show of that volume. The listener is aware of every tone that the musicians select. Rather than the notes coming across as a pile of mush, the interplay between instruments is discernible and the dynamics dramatically shift with subtle adjustments. That is not to say the show is an intellectual rather than a visceral experience; the band pushes drummer Todd Trainer front and center stage, as if putting their whole band in your personal space, and hammer their instruments with headbutt-like intensity.

Their set covered much of their career, leaning most on the 2014 album, “Dude Incredible.” “My Black Ass,” the first song on their 1994 debut, was played near the start of the set and got the biggest response, as ever finding the sweet spot halfway between The Fall and Primus. Other highlights included the brief yet rambunctious songs from “Terraform” (1998) and the song “Prayer to God” off “1000 Hurts” (2000), with its persistent, cathartic chant of “Just (expletive) kill him, kill him already.”

Opening act Shannon Wright put on a superb set of solo rock, which vacillated between minor-key dirges and explosive outbursts. At one point, Wright grew frustrated with talking from the bar area and turned her volume way up, drowning out the audience members and also vastly improving the sound. It’s hard to blame people for talking in this case. Doors to the venue opened just minutes before showtime, and it was a rare event to find so many longtime Portlanders in attendance – salt-and-pepper beards were the look of the hour – so there was catching up to do. The gathering culminated in an evening of music, movement, and community – the exact hallmarks of club culture, just with different tools.

Robert Ker is a freelance writer who lives in Portland.


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