SHIT AND SHINE 'Jream Baby Jream' (REPOSELP031) Riot Season

SHIT AND SHINE
'Jream Baby Jream'
catalogue # REPOSELP031
format: Limited Edition (400 Only) LP
label: Riot Season
barcode # 666017249018

400 copies for the world, equally split between green and orange coloured vinyl. No repress

LP Tracklisting :

A1. Dinner With My Girlfriend (10:22)
A2. Mermuda Triangle (4:41)
A3. Jream Baby Jream (5:41)

B1. Woodpecker (3:18)
B2. Rodeo Girls (10:05)
B3. Youth Led Worship (6:58)

Release Info :

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.

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Reviews :

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.

http://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.

http://www.foxydigitalis.com/foxyd/?p=29092

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

http://peterkempsrecordreviews.blogspot.co.uk/2012_03_01_archive.html