Steve Albini has a cookery blog. Yup, that Steve Albini. Steve “Big Black/In Utero/Don’t-you-dare-call-me-a-record-producer” Albini.

The blog is – guess what – uncompromising and excellently executed.

Steve likes yellow cornmeal: “fuck it, polenta is terrific.” Steve serves his chutneys warm, regardless of convention: “fuck me I’m not going to spray it with liquid nitrogen.” Steve simply doesn’t have time to make vegetable stock: “Vegeta is the shit.”

Steve’s clearly as good a cook as he is a record produc… sorry, recording supervisor (or whatever). His food looks delicious and his much-vaunted no-frills mindset clearly reaches into the pot and stirs the sauces for him.

I’m not sure why I found it so unlikely that a man involved in the music industry has outside interests. Maybe it’s because if most musicians have side projects, it’s just another band, or – more probably – some sort of laptop glitch-remix self-indulgence.

Such is the frequency of these side projects that I now wonder whether any band is ever considered the ‘main’ one any longer. Hey, all bands are now side projects, yeah?

This said, I’m, fairly sure that Soft Crest are the main focus in its constituent members’ lives. It just sounds so. Songs like Young Blood, grand, opulent and dreamy could never be the result of a secondary dalliance.

Some songs make their own noise and others are seeped in it, as if it is part of their being. Soft Crest’s songs are drenched in sounds, atmosphere and reverb.

Young Blood connects so directly to the shapeless dream states that we’ve all occupied at one point or another that its quickly obvious that its a song to which everyone will react. It’s almost hyper-unreal. Think about that while you’re stirring your ragu. Great stuff.

MORE: softcrest.bandcamp.com/album/young-blood