The Unstoppable Noise That Was Steve Albini

If all Steve Albini ever did with music was complain about it, he still would have reigned as one of its most brilliant provocateurs. But Albini came to make noise—as a punk guitarist, as a producer, as a writer—with rock’s most notoriously savage sense of humor. “I like noise,” he declared in a hugely influential 1986 manifesto in the fanzine Forced Exposure. “I like big-ass vicious noise that makes my head spin. I wanna feel it whipping through me like a fucking jolt. We’re so dilapidated and crushed by our...