Alternative Rock is a marketing slogan these days, but once it defined records that scared and sometimes enlightened people. Which is why the re-release of Big Black's entire 1983-87 output on CD is timely. The industrial grind of Prong and Ministry, the martial rhythms of Helmet, the guitar skronk of any number of shoegazers – all owe a debt to the Chicago trio founded by Steve Albini. The best of these discs, The Rich Man's Eight Track Tape, repackages the essential album Atomizer, from 1986, with an EP and a 45 of lesser material.

What the Velvet Underground's White Light/White Heat and Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols were to their eras, Atomizer was to the Eighties – an album that confronted the horror of the everyday with a sound to match. It immerses the listener in the unthinkable with "Jordan, Minnesota," about a middle-class town full of pedophiles. "And this will stay with you until you die/And I will stay with you until we die/And this is Jordan/We do what we like," Albini barks over body-slam percussion, scraping guitars and ghastly shrieks.

Atomizer suggests that pathology festers behind a facade of "normalcy": the small-town kid who goes berserk with lighter fluid in "Kerosene," the slaughterhouse voyeurs in "Cables" ("I don't know why we come here/Guess I just need the bang"), the "respectable man" who visits "Bad Houses" ("I tell myself I will not go/Even as I drive there"), the self-loathing that explodes in "Fists of Love." Equally subversive are Big Black's guitars. Rather than creating a signature voice on their instrument, Santiago Durango and Albini were more interested in creating an effect. They shaped sound – a gored bull moose, a train wreck, a staple gun – to suit the subject.

Yet for all their abrasiveness, the songs on The Rich Man's Eight Track Tape are laced with killer hooks, which puts the album a cut above Big Black's other worthy CD reissues: The Hammer Party (compiling the first three EPs), Songs About Fucking and the live Big Pile.

The Rich Man's Eight Track Tape is available from Touch and Go Records, P.O Box 25520, Chicago, IL 60625. (RS 649)

GREG KOT