SHIT AND SHINE
'229-2299 : Girls Against Shit'
catalogue # REPOSELP022/REPOSECD022
format: Limited Edition Vinyl 2xLP & CD
barcode # CD 666017207827
(No barcode on LP)

LISTEN TO THIS RELEASE VIA BANDCAMP BELOW

 

 

 

LIMITED EDITION 500 ONLY DOUBLE BLACK VINYL HOUSED IN BLACK GATEFOLD SLEEVE. 1000 ONLY CD HOUSE IN WHITE MINIATURE VINYL STYLE GATEFOLD CARD SLEEVE

CD & 2LP Tracklisting

A1. Have You Really Thought About Your Presentation? (9:14)
A2. Penthouse Is A Must (3:21)
A3. 20 Years Of Caring For The Nations Eyes (4:14)
A4. USA/MEXICO (2:19)
 
B1. Yes 9 10! (3:18)
B2. The Cusp Of Innocence, Prettily (2:04)
B3. Girls Against Shit (10:15)
B4. Shit No! (2:40)
B5. Pissing On A Shed (2:17)
 
C1. Roberts Church Problems (11:24)
C2. I'm MAKING My LUNCH!! (1:43)
C3. Kolchak The Night Stalker (2:14)
C4. Hotel Denmark (You 3, Ass, Pussy, Blow) (4:56)
 
D1. Friseur Nelson (6:43)
D2. Kings Heath Shit And Shine Appreciation Society (4:47)
D3. People Like you ...REALLY! (6:10)
D4. Goodbye And Good Gardening (1:48)

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Release Info:  

Shit And Shine return with their fourth Riot Season album - following 'You're Lucky To Have Friends Like Us' (REPOSELP04), 'Jealous Of Shit And Shine' (REPOSECD011) and last year's acclaimed 'Cherry' (REPOSECD017X/LP017) - after a link-up with the Load Records stable for their last release.

Continuing in their usual Riot Season style, what we have on offer here is the bizarre, the puzzling and the downright groovy. The epic, drawn-out single-riff jams that make up their legendary live shows are replaced by their trademark off-the-wall lunacy, making for a fun-packed adventure akin to biking trips with friends, and the local mental as a child. 

'229 2299 Girls Against Shit' could be the soundtrack to that summer, the beating of rats with sticks, the shooting of girls with gat guns, swimming in a mang ridden cut and the discovering of dead dogs and maggots. Ah, those were the days my friend ...

Available on CD and double vinyl (vinyl details to be announced). The CD version comes in a beautiful fluorescent pink adorned card gatefold sleeve. This version will be limited to just 1000 copies - any subsequent repress will not be in the gatefold sleeve. The double vinyl version will be limited to just 500 copies worldwide and packaged in a colour gatefold sleeve.

 

REVIEWS

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

DUCKS BATTLE SATAN

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

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

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

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

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

NOISE NOISE NOISE

Album Of The Week "The new Shit And Shine album is noisy little blighter that spits in the face of melody - and I love it!! ROTW and no messing!!"

PICCADILLY RECORDS

 

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