Search - Wackers :: Shredder

A great album from a great band with terrible sound

James R. Parrett | toronto, canada | 05/25/2007

(2 out of 5 stars)

"Scour the used vinyl bins for this one and the other fantastic Wackers LPs because whoever mastered this piece of aural junk needs to be re-schooled. This CD sounds like it's coming out of a cheap transistor radio. No warmth, no highs, no lows. It's just a harsh digital soup. So much the pity after waiting for so long for the Wackers to come out on CD. Because they were a great band and Shredder, while uneven, has so much magic that the music itself can elevate and inspire. What a travesty, Collector's Choice. You robbed us of hearing this classic album the way it should be heard - as music. Instead we get pinched ear-bleeding crap that insults the art it contains."

Coda

R. Potter | Buffalo, NY USA | 02/24/2007

(3 out of 5 stars)

"A sad end to a near-great band, this release finds the Wackers minus two of their principals, guitarist/vocalist Tim Stull (departed) and the brilliant drummer Earnie Earnshaw (who was ill or injured during almost all of these sessions, I forget which). The impact of these absences is immediately apparent--the formerly epic harmonies are thin without Stull's robust baritone, and frontman Bob Segarini is a pretty woeful fill-in for Earnshaw at the kit.



There is a sense in which this stripped-down and struggling lineup fits the material, because at its best Shredder is about weariness and melancholy. Gone is the cosmic hippie-bubblegum optimism of Wackering Heights and Hot Wacks, and in its place we find a kind of dark resignation--Segarini's "Coming Apart" and his gorgeously desperate "I'll Believe in You" are unlike anything in his previous output. Even when the band wants to rock ("Hey Lawdy Lawdy") or be playful ("Day and Night") they sound anxious and fatalistic, although in a not-uninteresting way.



Unfortunately, though, a good deal of the album -is- totally uninteresting, representing strained and disjointed versions of what they used to do with such seeming effortlessness. And it was all over after this--the Wackers broke up, and neither Segarini nor Randy Bishop, in any of their subsequent projects, ever came close again to the giddy heights they scaled on the first two Wackers LPs.



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