In 2016, David Bowie died two days after the release of Blackstar. Leonard Cohen lasted seventeen days after releasing You Want It Darker. Both albums were transmissions from the end of an artist’s life, received and understood as poignant reflections and reckonings. Steve Albini passed away ten days before the release of what will surely now be the final Shellac studio album, but the temptation to analyse it as a last testament is to be resisted. Unlike Bowie and Cohen, who knew their time was coming, the world lost Steve long before his time. In keeping with his attitude to his day job as a recording engineer (“I would like to be paid like a plumber,” he insisted), his band of over thirty years operated entirely without rock star mystique, approaching To All Trains th...