Noise rock huligani. Mermudski trokut rocka.
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Texan/London oddballs SHIT AND SHINE return with their fifth album for UK independent label Riot Season. As always the musicians identity and album details remain covered with a cheap cloak and a weird rabbit mask or two. What we can tell from the album stream is it's S&S at their warped best. Opening with a ferocious ten minute low end ribcage rattler charmingly titled 'Dinner With My Girlfriend', the signs are good from the off. The warped low end continues to attack the head on the almost danceable 'Mermuda Triangle'. When I say danceable, I'm not sure what kind of dance it'd be mind. Maybe a drunken one step forward - three steps back shuffle. It has some seriously disorientating waves of bass pummeling you throughout. Side one ends with the title track, 'Jream Baby Jream', a slow almost mournful affair. A guitar picking away over a sedate beat and some unintelligible crooning, maybe this is as close to a conventional song as S&S will write. Quite beautiful really.
'Woodpecker' kicks off side two and we're back in the BOOMING bass zone again. A short (for this album) sonic fuckfest of frazzled electronics and harsh beats. This is like old school S&S, totally out there in the fields tickling pigs with matches. The centre piece of side two is the epic 'Rodeo Girls', a churning, groove based ten minute romp based around a low end rumble and a suspiciously familiar guitar riff (is that a warped Dr Feelgoods 'Roxette' I can hear ???), if the Black Country still had dancehalls, women full of bitter and scratchings would be dancing to this every night of the week. MARVELOUS. The album ends with 'Youth Led Worship'. Back to the booming bottom end, it sounds something like the inside of a drunks head. Your lying pissed flat out on a venue floor, there's a bass bin booming about ten feet away and some friends talking to you in what appears to be a foggy alien language, you can't work out who you are or what they're saying. But you do know one thing ...
IT'S FUN.
Heavy and hopelessly diverse racket from the Texan/London duo. Their 5th album for UK indie Riot Season incites a violent swagger with the booming, doomy ten-minute lurch of 'Dinner With My Girlfriend' coming off like Justin Broaderick with a sicker sense of humour, while 'Mermuda Triangle' wastes a perfectly nice song under wicked waves of catty, face-mauling electronic noise and distortion, followed by the mournful, whiskey-drenched and glossolalic croons of 'Jream Baby Jream'. Flipside's 'Woodpecker' is starts out with purely ferocious rock malevolence and 'Rodeo Girls' straps into a hypnotic washing machine noise groove and 'Youth Led Worship' dribbles browny, black biley sludge bass over ripped samples and torture scene atmosphere. Brilliantly f*cked. - boomkat
If you’ve ever caught Shit and Shine live, chances are they pummelled your pleasure centres into screaming submission or despatched you to the bar in a miasmic haze of disgust. In the flesh, this band has taken many forms, but it has generally involved far too many drummers and not nearly enough riffs. They take a single momentous idea and give it a damn good thrashing, driving a single colossal phrase into the ground like a coyote beneath an oversized anvil. It’s a stunningly effective strategy – no dynamics, no build-ups, no progression, just economic, relentless, insanely dogged brutality. You could base a planet-unifying religion on such transcendent sensory experience and unbearable clarity of vision. But you probably shouldn’t.
All of which is self-consciously wrong-footing introductory irrelevance, because fifth album Jream Baby Jream is far from the anticipated metallic monoriff juggernaut – or riffernaut, if you will. The 30-second robo-voco-intro is essentially a bit of throwaway guff, but its awkward, clunky electronics do hint at what is to follow. These speak-and-spell vocals recur on first track proper, ‘Dinner With My Girlfriend’, albeit crushed to a paste beneath a grinding mass of outrageously filthy bass and nigh-intolerably brutal distortion. This is pretty much what you might imagine dubstep sounded like if you devoured the press coverage but never heard any of the actual tunes (and if your skull was full of iron filings). Brilliantly single-minded, it invokes S&S’s love of repetition, but being an ant’s cock shy of ten minutes long, it offers only a glimpse of the thrilling annoyance of which they are capable. ‘Mermuda Triangle’ follows, and offers further hints of immersion in electronic music. In here somewhere is a perfectly pleasant little handmade post-trip-hop instrumental, but thankfully such apple-white bourgeois guff is obscured by ostentatious crackle and bleeding-edge distortion that makes the speakers sound like they’re full of those pyrokinetic killer bees that the Daily Mail are probably always banging on about. The title track dials down the aggro to barely perceptible, its lush vibes redolent of the kind of hazy south-sea avant-tropicalia that Black Dice used to peddle circa Beaches & Canyons, the only subversive tang being the distant hectoring of a good-natured drunk.
The theoretical dubstep approach comes storming back with the brief ‘Woodpecker’, its offering of standard-issue wubs demolished by stoner-rock drum fills and digital razor-wire. The closing ‘Youth Led Worship’ serves to reinforce the overall nebulous theme (other musics, degraded), with evocative but unidentifiable dirge, woozily obfuscated vocal samples, and a faux groove skip – the sound of several gramophones playing in not-quite unison at the bottom of a stagnant pond.
All very grimy and diverting, but the highlight is, surely, undeniably, ‘Rodeo Girls’. An insistent pulse smothered in faux-antique analogue recording jelly, this is essentially the most irresistible rhythms of Can’s Delay 1968 (their finest hour; truth; all hail) spliced with the super-spiky riff from Dr Feelgood’s ‘Roxette’, gussied up with glorious, crunchy psychedelic wiffle and stretched out for (a mere) ten minutes.
You might disdain its atavism – after all, it’s considerably more retro than most of its electronica-dabbling neighbours – but it is by far the most instantly appealing and mesmerising offering here. Had Shit and Shine applied their trademark fondness for absurdly excessive repetition to this one track and contemptuously called it an album, I’d be delirious with joy. - Matt Evans
I’ve followed Craig Clouse through just about everything he’s done, most notably his more rock leaning projects like Crown Roast or TODD, but Shit and Shine has always been the most challenging of the bunch. More of an outlet to dabble in the harsher and possibly disorienting realms of power electronics, samples, basic guitar distortion, and synthesizers Shit and Shine is further muscled up with stacks of amps and multiple percussionists at times to create an amalgam of noise that really is quite like no other.
In the past Shit and Shine took to the chopped and screwed cuts of electronics and placed them against mammoth like simple riffing for desirable results more often than not. Blown out and punishing, the hulking mess created by such did well in further blurring the lines between straight noise and rock. Over the course of what has become a fairly prolific catalog, Shit and Shine has followed a similar track of that of fellow experimentalists Sightings. Both bands have went from the harsher beginnings of malfunctioning amps and sheer noise barrages towards a more bastardized form of rock that actually hits more nerves than their noisier pasts ever managed to. It’s with Shit and Shine’s latest album Jream Baby Jream where I believe they’ve really hit upon a great mixture of past and present, provoking feelings of paranoia, dread, and levels of discombobulation without sacrificing much of the groups infatuation with beat driven electronics. After a short thirty second intro, Shit and Shine hits with full force on “Dinner With My Girlfriend” by employing the use of swirling feedback to continually wrap around a HUGE blown out beat for the duration of nine minutes. It’s as close to “doom” as the group will likely ever get, but it’s an epically sized helping no doubt and one of the finest things on the album. Another highlight is on the flip side of the record with the roughly ten minute “Rodeo Girls” that develops a bit of a retro vibe to it thanks in part to an uncharacteristically danceable beat and guitar twang throughout that repeats in loop like fashion. It’s like one of those movie sequences where someone is walking down a huge city street surrounded by nothing but people, cars, and skyscrapers only the person walking is in no doubt inebriated and terrified. The album as whole operates greatly on a backbone of recurring beats and ambiance to create its creepy theatrics. The balance shown here though is fairly impressive. - builtonaweakspot.com/
Sometimes the concept is as big as the execution. There's something iconic about Shit And Shine, before I had heard them I had definately heard of them, they had just played Oxford's Audioscope and the mythology already begun to circulate..the stacks of amps the multiple drummers, the single riffs. I wouldn't see them until the London Scala in 2009 with Monotonix, Todd, Scout Niblett amongst others, great company indeed, but I felt the venue didn't suit them and what could have been epic and heavy felt a little detached and theatrical. They have come along way from single riff bludgeoning and on 'Jream Baby Jream' they feature some of their most melodic, outré and heavy material yet. This LP, the first from Riot Season 2012, is a miss mash of heavy weight electronics not dissimilar to AFX's thundercore years, demented country twanging and searing monolithic beat structures. 'Dinner With My Girlfriend' features a single grinding loop adorned with electroid voices almost like RnB on codeine, 'Woodpecker' vaults hard into clattering drum machine like warfare. 'Rodeo Girls' is Shit and Shine-disco a 10 minute club cut that bursts at the seams with fuzz and weight, the effect inducing a kind of dark sensual euphoria. Final track 'Youth Led Worship' goes into a repeated experimental fallout with songs colliding around a bass line from hell. It's a great album, one that buzzes with invention and repeatedly connects, long time fans will love this next phase of evolution, and in carving out tracks from the electronics upwards, imbued is a new accesibility which will no doubt draw in new comers to this dizzying furnace. - www.foxydigitalis.com/
This time I am record
reviewing the new Shit and Shine record from the Riot Season record
label - I have reviewed a Riot Season record before when I reviewed
Hey Colossus which I enjoyed very much and I am very pleased to be
reviewing this record because it is not even out yet and I get to
hear it before anyone else. Shit & Shine are an extremely noisy and
extremely different rock group led by Texan Craig Clouse and in the
videos that i've seen on Youtube they were dressed up as rabbits
with loads of drummers and guitars and look like they put on a very
good, very noisy show; I hope one day that I get to see them myself
because they look like a lot of fun.
This record then starts
off with a short introduction of some robots talking before the
first proper song Dinner With My Girlfriend starts. This song
reminded me of the 1812 Overture because it sounds like music made
with cannons and guns instead of drums but it is even noisier than
the 1812 Overture and sounds a bit like a war fought in the future
because it has robot voices in it and loads of air raid sirens. It
is a very noisy song but it's very nice to listen to and I liked it
very much.
Next up is a song
called Mermuda Triangle which starts of with a noise like wild
animals chattering in the jungle and drumming like African tom toms
then there are lots of other noises like a person breathing really
loud and maybe some monkeys and someone welding something - it is a
bit of a strange one that is quite hard to describe but it is very
good.
After Mermuda Triangle
is Jream Baby Jream which starts off with a drumbeat a bit like the
drumbeat that begins Apache by The Shadows but the rest of the song
is not like Apache at all. This one is not as loud as the others and
sounds a bit like a slow blues song. It is a very soft song and has
vocals which sound like someone who can't sing very well making it
up as they go along - I think the singer might have been a bit
pissed when he recorded it and I think this is a good thing.
Next song is Woodpecker
which is another very noisy song with very big drums in it and
guitars that sound like road drills and screaming like somebody
getting murdered. In the middle the song goes softer and there is
speaking that you can't make out properly but then it all kicks off
again and it all gets a bit weird; Shit & Shine must be very strange
people but it's good to be strange and not normal all the time.
Rodeo Girls is next and
is another very noisy electric guitar and drum track which made me
think of a big group of elephants stampeding and going wild and
making noise with their trunks. There are lots of other odd noises
in this one and I reckon this is one you have to turn up really loud
and let it get in head till your ears and head go all funny.
The last track on this
album is called Youth Led Worship and this is another quieter track
which is quite relaxing compared to some of the other stuff on this
record. I think it's good that the record ends on a softer tune
because it gives you a chance to calm down after all the noise.
Overall I would say
that this was a brilliant record that I really enjoyed listening to
and I think if people listened to it they would think this too. I
would give this record 10 out of 10. - Peter Kemp
Le Grand Larance Prix (2012) streaming
It's probably their most minimal and dance-floor friendly release to date, opting for hypnotic voodoo sludge rhythms and cross-eyed loop meditation rather than their typically overblown noise dynamic. Salted machine rhythms and vocals are choked by exhaust fumes and caked in dust on dangerously noxious opener 'Flirtations At A Cocktail Party', while the slow motorik throbber 'Frankie's Theme' bobbles along in a solvent-huffing haze of digital filter resonance and sickeningly mesmeric melody for a steadily unsettling 15 minutes. There's even a sort of yodelling dub-disco tilt to 'Switching 2 Nite Mode' and 'Frenchy's Automotive' lies int he back seat, taking a stoned break from the wheel to daydream over muddied radiowaves and heat-shimmer string drifts beside the baked Industrial estate crawl of 'How To Rattle A White Tailed Buck' and a head-siphoning rock'n'roll psych swirl called 'Klipp'. Fans of earlier James Ferraro, Nurse With Wound's loopier, rockier stuff, or Astral Social Club and High Wolf's Iibiis Rooge are recommended to fill their boots. - boomkat
Le Grand Larance Prix (2012) streaming
It's probably their most minimal and dance-floor friendly release to date, opting for hypnotic voodoo sludge rhythms and cross-eyed loop meditation rather than their typically overblown noise dynamic. Salted machine rhythms and vocals are choked by exhaust fumes and caked in dust on dangerously noxious opener 'Flirtations At A Cocktail Party', while the slow motorik throbber 'Frankie's Theme' bobbles along in a solvent-huffing haze of digital filter resonance and sickeningly mesmeric melody for a steadily unsettling 15 minutes. There's even a sort of yodelling dub-disco tilt to 'Switching 2 Nite Mode' and 'Frenchy's Automotive' lies int he back seat, taking a stoned break from the wheel to daydream over muddied radiowaves and heat-shimmer string drifts beside the baked Industrial estate crawl of 'How To Rattle A White Tailed Buck' and a head-siphoning rock'n'roll psych swirl called 'Klipp'. Fans of earlier James Ferraro, Nurse With Wound's loopier, rockier stuff, or Astral Social Club and High Wolf's Iibiis Rooge are recommended to fill their boots. - boomkat
Sh*t and Shine made their name and thrived in the underground with percussive nightmares and noise from demonic plagues that mimicked the chilling screams of civilizations being furiously eaten away from the inside out.
Their best material was very long bacchanals for a multitude of drummers and a few noise makers who were obsessed with Butthole Surfers and spastic psychedelic rock from Japan (Ladybird, Jealous of Sh*t and Shine, in particular their cover of the Crown Roast jam “Practicing to be a Doctor”, and Cunts with Roses). The noisier, the more crass their song titles were, the more they shined. With a slight detour with the uneven Cherry and Küss mich meine Liebe, Sh*t and Shine returned with a decent effort of ripping noise on 229 2299: Girls Against Sh*t.
After releasing a few live albums, they release Le Grande Larance Prix removing almost every ounce of noise and psychotic percussion adding nothing new leaving only ashes of what they once were. “Flirtations at a Cocktail Party” has a trite electronic rhythm with samples of race cars that are dissolved away by a (soft) industrial synthesizer that does more to put one to sleep than signal an apocalypse, a car race or even a cocktail party, one that they must of heard about from the 80s. “Frankies Theme” is 15 minutes of the most boring NEU! music ever. “Switching 2 Nite Mode” sounds like a demo Michael Rother shelved after leaving Harmonia and NEU! “Frenchys Automotive” and “How to Rattle a White Tailed Buck” are two very long dances in what one can guess would have been fit for a Can or Faust album...though "Frenchys Automotive" is a lazy sample of the Rolling Stones "Emotional Rescue". “Klipp”, the only decent track from the entire set, is a combination of NEU!’s neurosis made fit to dance to at one of Faust’s “parties”.
Sh*t and Shine could not have strayed further or made a worse album than Le Grande Larance Prix while still keeping the core principles lengthy "noise" and percussion jams. There are not many lazier and sh*t albums that are put out. This is one that gives underground bands a horrible name. -
Andrew Stecz
So the first tune on this album is called
‘Flirtations at a Cocktail Party’ is it? Right, so it’s bound to be all
lounge-sleaze and seductive melodies then? Oh, so it’s precisely ten
minutes long and is made up of the sound of accelerating motorbikes,
robotic voices, and a part hissing/part distorted and pummelling drum
machine? Ok, it sounds like Suicide playing the arcades on a burning and
collapsing pier? Fine. That’s me standing corrected.
Confusion and expectations confounded are
the hallmark of experimental Kraut-drone-noise duo Shit and Shine. And,
of course, this is what makes Le Grand Larance Prix so bloody excellent.
‘Frankie’s Theme’ is a plodding but
pleasing electronic oompah with dub-ish echoes and hazy synths floating
in and through it. Akin to a bonged out and deeply paranoid Daft Punk,
‘Switiching to Nite Mode’ is fucked-up extraterrestrial disco of the
highest order. It shifts roughly half way through to a sordid and
indolent hip-hop dripping with unnameable ooze that is occasionally
wiped up by a cleansing pad or two.
‘Frenchy’s Automotive’ is a like a
de-tuned then re-tuned Harmonia, with a groove that gets mangled beyond
recognition towards the end of its sixteen minutes. ‘How to Rattle a
White Tailed Buck’ could be the sound of upsetting a young deer
or goat, but if they give off the static that sears through the track
when this is attempted I certainly won’t be out to rile such beasts in
the near future. And finally ‘Klipp’, the shortest on the album at a
mere 9:31, is deconstructed and ambiguous motorik scored with improv
sounds and sounds of improv.
Serving up a six course menu of freaked and weird shit, and delivering a severe buffing of the intellect, emotions and senses, Le Grand Larance Prix is going to be like nothing else you hear this year.- angrybonbon
Bass Puppy (2010)
On this new 12", Shit And Shine go dubstep. Yes, this noisy lot have gone all urban on us and churned out two malevolent takes on lumbering bass worship. 'Bass Puppy' is a seriously gutsy eight-and-a-half minutes that crunches through walls of distortion and horrendously over-annihilated vocals. It all descends into madness, as you'd well imagine. Over on the B-side the ten minute 'F*ck You Folk Singers' pulls off essentially the same trick but with a little more lightness. It'd be interesting to hear this played out within a regular dubstep set to see how it'd work in a wider context - rather well, in all probability. - boomkat
You're Lucky To Have Friends Like Us (2004)
Larry Mannigan recently won accolades at the Hampton Court and Chelsea flower shows for his glorious rose hybrid named "child of the summer rain", which blooms in mid-November. Larry has requested that he may never be photographed or interviewed and likes to consider himself the "darkhorse"of the trio. Frank Mcayhan teaches the importance of safety around water and has won several bronze medals in local swimming competitions. C.Clouse is a keen map reader and rambler, just the kind of person you might like to run into if you were lost on a blustery hilltop in the lake district. Together Larry, Frank and Clouse have combined their unique interests and translated them into breathtakingly ear-appealing vignettes, treating us the listener to a marvelous lost universe of fantasy-completely appealing, impeccable in its taste and typically Shit and Shine!. Through sheer steely determination and deliberate love of life Shit and Shine have scaled the ladder of rock hierarchy bringing you their opus "you're lucky to have friends like us". And indeed we are lucky to have friends like them because together they have brought us a breathtaking musical exhibition of the finest quality recordings that will alternately excite and thrill, soothe and relax today's discerning music lover. Shit and Shine wish you as much happiness in life as they have had in making these recordings. They are currently in south America recording mudslides for a film soundtrack. They will be spending the winter months relaxing on a well earned boob cruise in the Caribbean. Larry, Frank and Clouse have one request from you and that is simply to ENJOY!
Fourth album release from Riot Season sees the label go right off the scale. Who are Sh*t and Shine? A bizarre London/Texas hybrid of weird craziness currently causing a stir down London way thats who. Musically this sits somewhere between early Butthole Surfers, PIL, Napalm Death, Merzbow, early Melvins, Mainliner, Serge Gainsbourg and Beach Boys. Limited edition of 500 numbered copies on lovely white vinyl in PVC outer with scrawled insert.- boomkat
Jealous Of Shit And Shine streaming
Having been lauded as the band of Sonar 2006, and following two sold out releases on Riot Season & Latitudes, SHIT AND SHINE return with their debut album proper 'Jealous Of Shit And Shine'. Taking a slightly more mature musical stance, 'Jealous Of Shit And Shine' is equal parts Strangulated Beatoffs, Butthole Surfers, Merzbow, Melvins and Boredoms - fusing sonic blasts and monster riffs into a hearty brew. Having already gained a cult following due to their legendary one riff / multi-drummer live shows - and from sharing stages with Acid Mothers Temple, Lightning Bolt, Sunno))) and Earth and more. SHIT AND SHINE are primed to explode.The initial pressing comes packaged as a 2CD set - the bonus disc being an expanded 17-track version of their sold out 'You're Luck
So the first SHIT AND SHINE record ('You're Lucky To Have Friends Like Us') came out on Riot Season on vinyl so white it gave you the urge to bite into it. It really did. Hell, it was even worth a lick and a sniff. That one sold out pretty quick so SHIT AND SHINE begged Riot Season to put it out again on CD. Riot Season obviously being the class act that they are and always have been have gone and put it on CD. Hoorah!! not worth biting into but still tasty.Verrrry fucking tasty.
After that the boys strayed into southern territory and recorded the 45 minute Latitudes series masterpiece 'Ladybird'. Have you heard it? Brilliant. Absolutely top fucking shelf and totally untouchable. If you haven't heard it i'm not surprised because that came out on limited CD and sold out pretty damn quick too. There are rumours of a vinyl only repress because the kids want it and the kids keep asking but its still just a rumour. Ahem!
Funny thing about SHIT AND SHINE is that most people know of them because of their live shows and not their recordings. Shame really but that's the price they pay for releasing such quality in low quantities. Name dropping time: Acid Mothers Temple, Lightning Bolt, SUNN O))),Earth. They've played with the heavy hitters and held their ground like true champions. Recently they played a sold out show at this years Sonar festival in Barcelona where they were billed as "group of the year". Rightly so. Usually they have between 5 and 10 drummers onstage and 2 bass players. At a show in Germany last year they had 10 drummers, played one riff on the 2 basses for almost 2 hours, blew one of the p.a. speakers, played on while toxic smoke filled the room and the speaker was changed, and then played for another hour. Fucking ridiculous. Fucking genius. FUCKING LOUD!
So anyway time for a new record and here it is. 'Jealous Of Shit And Shine'. Cheeky cunts. Appropriate though. Like 'You're Lucky To Have Friends Like Us', this one is all over the place but quite a bit more refined and mature. The songs are a bit longer. Not such a slap on the back of the neck like the earlier stuff. Less of a head rush and more like a an intense trip that could go VERY WRONG at any moment. They've roped in one of their heroes BEN WALLER from the COUNTRY TEASERS for vocals on a song called 'Unchained Ladies Shopper'. Sounds like something between Country Teasers and early Sonic Youth I suppose. W hat a great combination! SHIT AND SHINE are all about great but totally awkward combinations. There's a song called 'There Are 2 Bakers Now' for instance, where you can hear twigs snapping, people fucking, and mud sloshing around while a seriously eerie ritualistic drum thud thud thud plays out over the top of some kind of satanic chant?! mmm hmmmm. Or the song called 'When Extreme Dogs Go Wrong' that sounds like some totally kick ass evil southern rock break down but with a sun burnt scumbag drunk football hooligan rattling on about how "Wherever I go ,I go for football".
They do a 35 minute cover version of their beloved early nineties Midwestern retard rock heroes THE STRANGULATED BEATOFFS. The song is called 'Practising To Be A Doctor'. Anybody remember that? a true classic and SHIT AND SHINE do it justice. What a great riff! A riff that totally deserves to be played for at LEAST 35 minutes .sounds even better with the 6 drummers pounding the shit out of it! fucking great. Really really fucking GREAT. Oh yeah, and it wouldn't be a shit and shine record without a couple trashy ass stupid euro pop numbers. 'Hot Vodka'. Oh god. Take a disco bass line crank it into the red and get a French homeless guy to croon over the top. CLASSY. 'Seeing Life Through A Young Mans Eyes'- like Merzbow doing electro! why the fuck not?! add a couple of really nasty scummy drug/noise rock blasts in the form of 'Here Come The Vikings' and 'No Darling it's a Pentagram' and there you have it- 'jealous of shit and shine'. This is the REAL fucking DEAL!
There's certainly a lot of hype around British noise-mongers Sh*t and Shine; they were heralded as the best band of Sonar 2006 (not that hard) and have been blogged about incessantly after supporting Sunn O))), Acid Mothers Temple and Lightning Bolt... but what are they like on record? Well they're loud, they're really loud, and distorted as if you couldn't have guessed - every sound is as if it's been dubbed to cassette tape four or five times, it's melted, munged and shocking - did I mention it's totally f*cking great too? The number of drummers the band has ranges from two to four depending on who you talk to, all I know is that they have drummerS plural, and they use their percussion wisely. Whether they use it to simply restrain their Wolf Eyes-style noisy leanings ('Here Come the Vikings') or whether they use it as the centrepiece of the track ('Practising to be a Doctor') it's clear that Shit and Shine are a drum oriented act. With broken keyboards and clearly malfunctioning amplifiers the band come across like a noisy avant-rock version of Volcano the Bear, with an absurd humour that puts them way ahead of their contemporaries in the noise-rock scene. They appear unwilling to drop easily into one category or another instead penning tracks that flirt with just about any genre you can bring to mind. An incredibly daring but at the same time puerile and very amusing record, 'Jealous of Shit and Shine' should turn the bloggers choice into the word on the lips of tired journos everywhere. As if this wasn't enough the initial copies of the album are bundled with an extra cd of their long-gone vinyl only album 'You're Lucky to Have Friends Like Us' - lucky indeed. - boomkat
229-2299 Girls Against Shit! (2009) streaming
Rumour has it this is the loudest album ever made, and based on the ear-flaying extremities of 'Have You Really Thought About Your Presentation?' that doesn't sound like an empty claim. Shit And Shine have always seemed to swagger through their career with a certain air of devilish pranksterism about them, but this latest album finds them ditching their most gratuitously provocative tendencies (see their C**ts With Roses LP for that) in favour of remorselessly punishing kraut-metal, all draped in the noisiest, most overdriven recording style imaginable. The fudgy production, far from destroying the band's sound, pretty much IS the band's sound, and although it most likely goes deep into the red for the entire duration of the record, you don't really get the sense that the record's being consumed or excessively obscured by the distortion. Instead, the tireless noise splutter-funk of 'Penthouse Is A Must' comes across as very bright and crisp... if not particularly clean. After a slew of relatively taut compositions (well, sort of) the band's most experimental daftness begins to come through in time for the ten-minute title track, sounding thoroughly surreal as they chop between slapback delayed drums, droning SunnO)))-like guitar grind and dialogue exchanges that sound a bit like Spinal Tap commentating on the Isle Of Man TT. Immediately after this, S&S slip into a goopy house groove for 'Shit No!', which shows some of the band's range, but as you work your way deeper into the playlist it's doomy, sludge-mired metal all the way, with frenetic fuzz evacuations like 'I'm Making My Lunch!!' and 'Kolchak The Night Stalker' launching especially nefarious affronts on the senses. Then, after seventy-something minutes of auricular assault comes one of the band's rare subtle moments: 'People Like You... Really!', which offers a drum-punctuated death ambient feel that sounds a bit like Wolf Eyes trimming some hedges. Badly. It's yet another aspect of this bizarre British group's craft, helping to round out 229-2299 Girls Against Sh*t as surely their best, most complete, longest and loudest album to date. - boomkat
Sometimes a record can be
simply overwhelming. Not necessarily a bad thing but when you have to
sit down and write about a record being overwhelmed does not
facilitate a quick post. Those nice people at Riot Season sent me
this at the same time as the excellent Black Boned Angel’s Verdum,
but it’s taken me another week to come to terms with this record and
try to write something sensible about it. If you have already heard
Shit and Shine’s Cherry then you know a little of what you are in
for, but I’ll warn you at the outset 229 2299 Girls Aginst
Shit is a much more difficult record.Shit and Shine 2009 are still the
ugly, violent, sociopathic stepchild of noise-rock, but they may have
gone off their meds.
As per usual, Shit and
Shine on record are a very different beast to their live incarnation.
The production never allows the songs to find their way out of a
morose of fuzz and mud yet somehow it works well. The whole thing
kicks of with the epic, stonking, rock-pig groove of the
first track, have you really thought about your presentation,
which has to be the best rock and roll song in the world this minute.
I kid you fucking not. USA/MEXICO is what Harry Pussy would have
sounded like had they been a black metal band with a Ween fixation.
Yep that good. Yes 910! could be spacerock if it somehow had a scab
that was being picked at. There’s an industrial, Wolf Eyes vibe
about Pissing on a Shed and a left field take on early 1990′s
hardcore on Robert’s Church Problem. How a record this full-on
doesn’t take itself so seriously shows just how much fun noise-rock
can be but I had to listen to two days worth of Stars of the Lid in a
an attempt to make ammends with my ears
DUCKSBATTLESATAN
(link)Go home. Go home now — and tune your radio to static. Now do the same thing with the TV. If you have a blender, stick a frozen chicken in it and start that up too. Hell, while you’re in the kitchen, lie on the floor and monotonously and incessantly beat yourself over the head with a chopping board whilst sporadically slamming various pots, pans and root vegetables against the wall . . . now close your eyes. Imagine you’re in a glider with Merzbow and Earth — heading straight towards a pylon — and, if you’re still conscious, the barely lucid aura rapidly engulfing you will be somewhere close to the jarring and unhinged noise-scapes of Shit and Shine.
The brain child of Todd impresario Craig Clouse, Shit And Shine have been churning out hulking sonic spasms of unrelenting, loosely structured noise since 2004’s limited edition LP You’re Lucky To Have Friend Like Us, steadily building momentum through a series of seemingly non-coherent releases, and semi-comprehensible live performances — frequently featuring no more than guitars, oh, and about ten drummers.
Don’t let the fact that SAS is essentially a Todd side project fool you, though — if you were expecting anything resembling the latter’s Southern rock-imbued, riff-heavy sludge then, frankly, don’t. The only thing these two have in common is the truly apocalyptic volume and ingurgitating listening experience.
From the nine-minute, mono-riff nausea of opener ‘Have You Really Thought About Your Presentation?’, through the minimal, death-rattle sampling electro of ‘Shit No!’, over the garage rock played backwards – by screaming, piss soaked ne’er-do-wells, hammered on special brew – of ‘Kolchak The Night Stalker’, right to the hauntingly lo-fi drone of ‘People Like You... REALLY!’, SAS expectorate wave after wave of uncomfortable, yet engrossing pandemonium. To accurately describe the full on, aural harassment that is 229-2299 Girls Against Shit, is a tall ask; with it, SAS have created something truly vital, and dare it be said a work of near genius.
Whereas Q reading, drive-time listening types will wax lyrical about the current crop of mockney oiks and their oh so relevant prose on ‘modern life’ and true-to-life tales of blah-blah-blah..., SAS have crafted a real exploration of what it is to be alive; brutal, uncomfortable, often vial and deranged – Clouse and his cohorts have amassed seventeen tracks that simply throw so much noise and disturbance at the listener that any semblance of hope is cast asunder, leaving only an unnerving and debilitating sense of contradictory tranquillity. Calm and chaotic, serene and schizophrenic, quite literally the shit... and shine - THE QUIETUS (link)
I love record shops. Always have done. Flicking through the racks trying to find that band you’ve been searching for since you heard them in session on John Peel in 1992. But it’s not that often I get the opportunity to visit them these days and when I do, they're pretty disappointing places. I’ve now accepted the fact that the bulk of my music now arrives in a little padded envelope.
So it’s like Christmas morning for me most days at TMF Towers. I run full pelt toward the post trolley to see what records are waiting for me. But it becomes frustrating when I know something is on its way to me but it just doesn’t arrive. I have been getting very excited about the new Shit & Shine album and deliberately avoided listening to any samples. I wanted to experience the album as a whole. So imagine my frustration as every day I rifled through the post to find it was absent.
Yet when it did finally arrive the reason for its delay became clear. This is a record of such weirdness that it disrupts any machinery in its vicinity; its chaotic tentacles reaching out and disrupting the laws of order in everything it touches. This explains why it had to be delivered by a St.Bernard especially trained for this occasion by listening exclusively to Captain Beefheart and fed on a diet of psychedelic Bufo Alvarius toads.
This is an extreme record. An all out assault on your ears. The first track ‘Have You Really Thought About Your Presentation’ comes in at 9 minutes takes no prisoners. It grabs you by the ankles and smashes you reputedly against the floor and ceiling with waves of relentless noise. The overbearing production is an instrument in itself, as pivotal to the sound as the guitar, drums or whatever other weapons the band are employing in making this disorientating auditory onslaught. Layer upon layer of distortion, amps filled to the brim with oxyacetylene and turned up to 11. The band sound as if they are playing whilst riding some chaotic version of the waltzers that could at any time spin off into oblivion.
Like the school bully who sometimes pretends to be your friend, only to suddenly turn on you Shit and Shine occasionally calm it down but lull you into a false sense of security. Then when your back is turned they leap upon you and pound your head into yet another wall of noise.
In such times of economic turmoil we can’t all afford our monthly visit to the dominatrix. But you’ve been good this month? Right? So punish yourself in the discomfort of your own home with a bit of Shit & Shine. - THE MUSIC FIX (link)
Record of the Week :
When we first heard / heard about Shit And Shine, a mysterious noise rock collective from the UK, they definitely seemed custom made for aQ, multiple drummers, multiple bass players, someone playing lawnmower, a sound equal parts vintage Butthole Surfers, classic Hawkwind, and modern kraut-psych-drone-rock a la Circle and Pharaoh Overlord and Cave and the like, not to mention the garish, sometimes offensive album, art, the hilarious and usually offensive song titles, we were sold, smitten, totally obsessed. And thankfully, in the several years since that very first 12”, very little has changed, almost all of the aforementioned essentials are still part and parcel of the Shit And Shine experience (minus the lawnmowers, but then the more we've come to understand these jokers, the more we realize that probably a lot of the 'facts' circulating about S&S is total bullshit, so odds are there never was any lawnmowers, sigh), and if anything, they've managed the impossible, getting tighter and more polished, more rocking, with better and somewhat proper 'songs', while simultaneously getting more and more fucked up and far out, taking super minimal elements and combining them into something massive and bewitching and baffling and heavy as fuck, but sounding literally unlike anything we've ever heard. Sure there are elements of plenty of stuff we love, but the way these guys twist those elements and cram them into whatever shape THIS is, just blows our minds, and eardrums.
So yeah, garish pink on white cover, masked lady with one of her breasts out on the front, a weird long necked headless super hero lady on the back, inside an awesome scary photo of two little girls, long hair obscuring their faces, standing hand in hand in front of a massive wall of amps, and song titles: “Have You Really Thought About Your Presentation?”, “Goodbye And Good Gardening”, “Girls Against Shit”, “20 Years Of Caring For The Nations Eyes”, “The Cusp Of Innocence, Prettily”, “I'm Making My Lunch”, “ People Like You... REALLY!” and on and on, but none of that would mean shit if there wasn't a head spinning gut churning din to back it up, and holy shit do these guys bring the noise this time around.
The opening track, “Have Your Really Thought About Your Presentation” is equal parts Brainbombs and last list's Record Of The Weekers Rusted Shut, but with a little bit of krautish hypnorock mixed in, so what you get is a crushing, super distorted mega main RIFF, a pounding mesmerizing drum beat, everything super hot and blown out and in the red, looped and locked and pounding away over and over and over and over, but with some weird stuff going on, buried vocals, strange bits of glitch and crunch, and the weirdest part of all, seems impossible to play, but every few measures, it sounds like the band skips a beat, almost like the record skips, but it's super subtle, like a weird stutter step, that just makes it all the more weird, but no less trancelike and heavy, and it only gets weirder from there on out.
All the songs here are based on rhythms, which comes with the territory when you have multiple drummers, the second track begins all skittery, an almost drum machine sounding shuffle, which slips into a looped dubbed out pound, while all around the rhythms is buffeted by swirling FX, jagged shards of jangle guitar, and super distorted wild over-saturated leads and weird voices buried in the mix. The next track explodes in a tangle of twisted string buzz and fractured electronics, before those sounds coalesce into a crazy noise drenched rock racket, rife with angular guitars and layer upon layer of drones and voices and feedback and sonic chaos. “USA / Mexico” is some Buttholes gone black metal weirdness, super murky muddy riffage, pounding blast beats, start stop rhythms, bizarre vokills and crazy electronics all over the place.
The crushing stop start chug of “The Cusp Of Innocence, Prettily”, almost makes the record for us, with a killer main riff, and an increasingly distorted guitar tone, until a sample of some cheesy European sounding folk song comes in, and like magic, the crunch and chug and pound lock in and fit perfectly with that lilting little ditty, turning it into something nasty and scary and AWESOME. It's only a second, but it's sooooo good.
The abstract dub of the title track, the main rhythm made out of what sounds like someone writing on a chalkboard, some super effected tripped out dubby bursts, random spoken words, thick sheets of warm washed out guitars, until the track gets all Circle-y, but filtered through some fractured nineties industrial, like Pharaoh Overlord jamming Meat Beat Manifesto, but with strangled metal guitars and vrooming motorcycle sounds. There's some dance-y almost house sounding throb and pulse, but it's butted up right against a twisted angular noise rock / electro mashup, that is so distorted it's dabbling in Merzbow territory.
The other looooong track “Roberts Church Problem” sounds like it was recorded live, ad thus sounds like vintage S&S in full on unhinged Buttholes mode, multiple pounding drummers, wall of buzz, fuzzed out heaviness, repetitive and looped and seemingly never ending (we wish!). “Friseur Nelson is another good one, all very Circle, distorted and murky, a killer tribal rhythm, crumbling fuzz bass, and a muted chugging low end, some weird haunting chiming minor key melodies, another one that could have been stretched out to the end of the record and we would have been perfectly happy.
We could go on and on and on (even more than we already have), but why bother? Every song here rules, they're all super strange and heavy and hooky and groovy and noisy, and somehow, for being so disparate, they all manage to sound like part of a proper record. Well, certainly not a PROPER record, but you know what we mean. And while the rest of the songs are just as tripped out, and what-the-fuck and holy shit! as the ones we already described, odds are by now you probably got the feel for whether this is your cup of blown out rhythmic heaviness or not.
The sound of Shit And Shine is like some constantly twisting and transforming, bloody and mangled wreckage, equal parts This Heat, Aluk Todolo, Geronimo, Butthole Surfers, Rusted Shut, Brainbombs, Merzbow, Terminal Cheesecake, Strangulated Beatoffs, Faust, Laddio Bollocko, all pulled apart and reassembled into some damaged Frankenhooker noiserock drum circle spacejam. And odds are if you like any or all of those bands, you're gonna LOVE this...- AQUARIUS RECORDS (link)
Album Of The Week
"Oh Man the latest Shit and Shine record is totally awesome. From the moment I hit play I'm smashed over the head with some ugly, nasty overloaded distorted repetitive heavy rock music. 'Have you Really Thought About Your Presentation?' is a blistering opening track to say the least. It's nuts! It's ridiculous and I LOVE IT! I could quite happily leave the record there and I'd die a happy man BUT there are another 19 tracks of mayhem, weird samples, noise, feedback primal drum pounding. It sounds like a bunch of neanderthals getting wasted and making a pretty messed up noise record. There are some quite brutal and harsh moments on here with pretty much everything being in the red. Having said that there is a sense of control and not just total chaos. A lot of the rhythms are very precise and the drumming is pretty damn tight. Some of the album is so over the top it's almost cartoon-ish and you get a distinct sense that these guys really don't take things too seriously. It's totally absurd and I get the same joy and twisted comedy fun that I got from the Butthole Surfers way back. Man this my even be there best one yet!!!! CD and 2LP to follow on Riot Season and you need it in your life. '229 2299 Girls Against Shit' is mastered mighty loud so watch yer speakers!"
NORMAN RECORDS
"Sometimes a record can be simply overwhelming. Not necessarily a bad thing but when you have to sit down and write about a record being overwhelmed does not facilitate a quick post. Those nice people at Riot Season sent me this at the same time as the excellent Black Boned Angel’s Verdum, but it’s taken me another week to come to terms with this record and try to write something sensible about it. If you have already heard Shit and Shine’s Cherry then you know a little of what you are in for, but I’ll warn you at the outset 229 2299 Girls Aginst Shit is a much more difficult record.Shit and Shine 2009 are still the ugly, violent, sociopathic stepchild of noise-rock, but they may have gone off their meds.
As per usual, Shit and Shine on record are a very different beast to their live incarnation. The production never allows the songs to find their way out of a morose of fuzz and mud yet somehow it works well. The whole thing kicks of with the epic, stonking, rock-pig groove of the first track, have you really thought about your presentation, which has to be the best rock and roll song in the world this minute. I kid you fucking not. USA/MEXICO is what Harry Pussy would have sounded like had they been a black metal band with a Ween fixation. Yep that good. Yes 910! could be spacerock if it somehow had a scab that was being picked at. There’s an industrial, Wolf Eyes vibe about Pissing on a Shed and a left field take on early 1990’s hardcore on Robert’s Church Problem. How a record this full-on doesn’t take itself so seriously shows just how much fun noise-rock can be but I had to listen to two days worth of Stars of the Lid in a an attempt to make ammends with my ears".
NOISENOISENOISE (link)PICCADILLY RECORDS
Cherry (2008) streaming
They’re an afternoon spent tearing up betting-slips at the bookies. A stain on your shirt that won’t wash out. Shit and Shine refuse to be categorised, commodified or caught with their trousers down.
They’re a blurred snapshot of bi-polar Britain, camera-phone footage of a nation that’s slowly swallowing itself whole, one mouthful at a time. They’re a requiem for back-street cafes and grubby little places that now only exist in our memory or in back-issues of Savage Messiah magazine. They’re a brittle, defiantly distorted soundtrack to our own cultural demise: time at the bar, gentlemen, please!
Shit
and Shine don’t make records, they make accusations, threats and
intimidating phone-calls. Albums sell out in a day or maybe they were
never even released. Press-releases come with grainy, badly photocopied
pictures of band-members, their faces resembling some freakish Fotofit
identity parade, while YouTube is awash with dodgy-looking live clips
shot in cellar-bars or at some Argentine Noise fest.
Their
new album “Cherry” has been deliberately released to coincide with
the clocks going back. It’s a sullen, grimy and spiteful LP, full of
piss and vinegar and drums. Imagine an after-pub punch-up in A&E
with the Burundi Drummers, or the Butthole Surfers if they had gone to
primary school in Harlesden. It’s petty, vicious stuff and, like its
magnificently delinquent predecessor, “Jealous of Shit and Shine,”
it’s available from the ever-reliable, forward-thinking Black Country
label Riot Season.
“Cherry”
is a treasure-trove of dark, malignant delights that finds the band
augmenting its trademark Neo-Brutalist sound with a whole bunch of
unexpected textures:
“Charm
and Counter Charm” is the sound of Funk turned evil…George
Clinton’s mother-ship abandoned and covered in graffiti in some
wasteland in Moss Side. Bootsy Collins smoking the crack equivalent of
green kryptonite, chasing imaginary maggot-brained booty and smurf-voiced
machine-elf ho’s.
“Prize
Winning” is the Glitter Band banged up on a trumped-up drug-smuggling
charge in some nightmarish, dysentery-riddled Vietnamese jail. At night,
Gary’s disembodied voice talks to them from the toilet-grate through a
haze of malarial fever and hashish.
“Sharlade”
is the theme-tune to Celebrity Big Brother played by gibbons, while
“Cigarette Sequence” attaches contact-mics to yer teeth and carries
out a series of unnecessary root-canal treatments.
“High
Brooms” is an epic sludge-out: a slow, low-end duel-to-the-death
involving guitar, organ and narcoleptic drums that invokes the spirit of
John Cale’s early 60s Vox Continental drone-musik on “Sun Blindness
Music.” It’ll also have fans of Spacemen 3, Sunn o)), etc weeing
themselves with pleasure.
Of
course, no Shit and Shine album would be complete without at least one
side-long, drum-bludgeoning monster-truck of a track. “The Rabbit
Song” arrives like a really bad case of OCD or a documentary on
horse-ripping, but with a riff to die for. Children are born, families
split up, people wash their hands til they bleed, then wash them some
more. But still the band plays on: through rain, snow, hell and
high-water. Cats die and dogs copulate. But the band are unstoppable - a
force of nature - pausing only to bicker and bitch at each other
mid-song through megaphones. When it finally finishes, it’s both a
relief and a jarring loss. Like the death of a family member after a
long, unpleasant illness.
Yet,
inexplicably, you find yourself reaching for the Replay Button: it’s a
scientifically proven fact that Shit and Shine are more addictive than
Christopher Lee lottery scratch-cards.
“Cherry”
is a full-on essential purchase for anyone who’s ever loved raw
Outsider Music, Free Noise, Hardcore Punk, Barbarian Rock or underground
experimental shit of any size, shape or hue. Trust me, it’s a total
gotta-have for Doom Metallers, Sludge Addicts, Japrock Fetishists,
Xtreme Drone Geeks or anyone who ever chased a rabbit down a hole.
The first time we heard from the UK's bass and drum (not to be confused with drum and bass) ensemble Shit And Shine, we were already predisposed to love them. Seeing as they featured multiple bass players, a stage full of drummers, and most importantly, at least to us, several lawnmowers. Fuck. Yeah.
Over the course of the last three or four years, these guys have continually pummeled us within an inch of our lives, with their throbbing tribal Butthole Surfers style onslaught, a furious blown out in the red drug drenched psych rock, but only the loosest approximation of rock. More like some sort of government drug experiment, where various deviants and ne'er do wells, criminals and sociopaths, were incarcerated, dosed with all manner of experimental psychotropics, then let loose in a concrete bunker filled with drums and amps and busted up old bass guitars, everything recorded for posterity, until someone started leaking the tapes, code name: SHIT AND SHINE.
This was the most wacked shit we'd heard since Terminal Cheesecake or the Strangulate Beatoffs. And every record drifted further and further out, as the band became more and more unhinged, and now there's this, Cherry, a massive double lp that while still demonstrating the kind of physical and psychic damage Shit And Shine can do, also reveals a whole new world of fucked up sound these guys have tapped into. In fact, when we first threw this on, we weren't even sure it was the same band.
The record opens with a simple percussive drum jam, all toms, sort of tribal, beneath a series of samples, and film clips, a little weird, reminiscent of old industrial, until the next track obliterates the first with a blast of awesome processed metallic riffing, almost like some heavily FX-ed Iron Maiden leads, draped over some shitty shiney sludge, then suddenly guitars flip backwards, the sound becoming some freaked out psych damage, lurching into some killer stop / start dynamics, a churning what-the-fuck sort-of metal jam. Oh yeah, there's also a long long track of old school proto disco, groovy, druggy dancefloor shit, unexpected, but it sort of works in S+S's tweaked sound world. And all of that stuff is peppered with brief super short tracks of classic Shit And Shine tribal drugpsych pummel, but it always slips back into somethingŠ curious.
Side three is a single side long track, a gorgeous chunk of layered drone, guitars buzz and rumble, basses throb and pulse, there are probably some synths in there too, the various layers churning and shifting, drifting and shimmering, super hypnotic but still subtly fucked up and creepy.
And finally, for those folks who were put off by all this weirdness, meaning even more weirdness than normal, all of side 4 is taken up by a full on, head crushing Shit And Shine blow out. Doped up and spaced out, huge loping rhythms, pounding multiple drumkits, the basses and guitars a chaotic tangle of crumbling riffs and throbbing distortion, everything locked into relentless looped churning crush. So completely filthy and crusty and damaged that it sounds constantly on the verge of falling to pieces, but it's this continuous chaos and impending doom, that makes S+S's freaky jams so intense and so fucking awesome!
Need we say, TRES RECOMMENDED!
More totally and hilariously garish cover art. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES! We got a bunch but AQ folks seem especially partial to Shit -AND- Shine, so these will probably go pretty quick. You have been warned. - Aquariusrecords.org
Shit & Shines new album is another fine & dandy slab of demented, heavy,noisy and puzzling/fun mayhem. Going from seemingly endless chugging / addictive riff craft, to noise boils, to dialogue and texts over looped rhythms, to all manner of quirky and inside humour driven tracks. Really the best way to try and describe S&S is a British Butthole Suffers, but really you have to hear and live Cherry to fully understand the wonder that is S&S. This time around they offer up a double vinyl set lasting in all just over 70 minutes & the main focus of of the tracks (aside from the comic and bizarre sidelines) is to create lo-fi layered and down ‘n’ nasty grooves and riffs that go from just a few minutes to 20 plus, sucking you well & truly in (certainly on the longer tracks). We go from sleazy & funky guitar struts, to stuck vertigo inducing indie riff falls, to boiling psychodelic meets doom organ and gitar long hits. A few of my favourites stand as: Track number two Am I nice Guy? Which introduces strange and bloody Mike Hammer like tale spoken over the top of a layered marching drum work out. The last and longest track The Rabbit song which links stuck industrialized & very sleazy punk doom riff ‘n’groove to all manner of ranting and raving, weird sound elements and textures that come and go at will. It makes you want headbang or twist in your seat, making it a rather trick track to play while out in public on you mp3 player. When it finally stops 20 minute later you’ve still got the damn thing branded into you mind- I swear you’ll be humming for hours.
Heavy, noise, groovy and bizarre really if you enjoyed their other work you’ll lap this up like a rabid dog on heat & if your still to enter S&S world your in for one hell of a cheeky, brutal and memorable ride- so come on suck S&S cherry you wont regret it, I swear. - www.musiquemachine.com
Freeform noise rock hooligans Shit And Shine open this latest opus with the extremely spooked 'Creepy Ballerina', a track that plays the same game as all those horror movie soundtracks that involve treated recordings of children singing. That sort of uneasy restraint comes to an abrupt end pretty soon though, as the band tear up their fuzzy, dislocated instruments across the ensuing tirade of metallic funk tracks and industrialised bassline monsters. Key to this album's success is the fact that there are plenty of moments that catch you off-guard: after the radiophonic strangeness of 'Charlade' comes the all-out noise white wash of 'Cigarette Sequence', a piece that sounds at ease straddling the increasingly narrow divide between the American noise underground and Nordic black metal. Not entirely at odds with that aesthetic is 'High Brooms', which sounds how SunnO))) might were they to set aside their instruments in favour of vacuum cleaners. It lasts the entirety of the third side, and frankly would be impossible to follow with anything but the gnarled madness of 'The Rabbit Song', which also sprawls itself across the full twelve inches, over on the flipside. By no means an album for the faint of heart, Cherry is a real test of endurance, and indeed your mental health, but for those of you who are likely to respond favourably to a 75 minute aural sandblasting (in the funkiest possible way, that is) this is a pretty unmissable release. - boomkat
You're Lucky To Have Friends Like Us (2004) streaming
Fourth album release from Riot Season sees the label go right off the scale. Who are Sh*t and Shine? A bizarre London/Texas hybrid of weird craziness currently causing a stir down London way thats who. Musically this sits somewhere between early Butthole Surfers, PIL, Napalm Death, Merzbow, early Melvins, Mainliner, Serge Gainsbourg and Beach Boys. - boomkat
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