Excellent Italian Greyhound

Steve Albini told *The Quietus

I remember feeling like we were much more light-hearted about the material and I remember being very happy with the photograph of Uffizi on that cover. Uffizi was Todd’s dog. He lived to be a geriatric Italian greyhound and he was Todd’s closest companion for fifteen or sixteen years before he died. He was genuinely a member of our extended family and definitely a member of Todd’s family. I was very pleased that he was immortalised on that cover. We’re basically a rock band but that’s leavened with a few experimental impulses which we indulge. There’s a saying in statistics that streaks are not predictable, they’re only accountable. You can look back on a string of results and say we flipped the coin a hundred times and we had seven in a row that were heads. You can only see that after it’s happened. You can’t predict it. The overall tone of any of our records is only discernible in hindsight. While we’re making them, we’re just pursuing whatever’s on our minds at the moment. When we put together a collection of songs to make a record, it develops a personality just from the grouping of songs that it happens to be. You can recognise that once it’s done but it’s not like we set out to make a more jovial record.