shit & shine: powder horn

The next release on Diagonal is the latest album from Texas-based demolition artist Craig Clouse aka Shit & Shine. Titled Powder Horn, it follows-up Clouse's 2013 Diagonal debut 12", which channeled his shape-shifting sound into sharp shocks of mangled club music. On this new album, his first full-length since 2012's Jream Baby Jream, Clouse voyages still deeper down his own sonic wormhole. Its raucous slabs of deviant funk, wiry disco and burnt-out acid are sculpted to soundtrack strung-out dancefloors and their seedy early-hours aftermath, yet they still bear crucial traces of Shit & Shine's history in noise rock. Drums bound, crash and detonate to drive the music forward in fits and starts, their sound veering from the chest-busting thud of a techno kick to the hollowed-out clatter of a live punk band. Writhing acid lines do battle with taut, spidery guitar motifs, wrenching the momentum abruptly sideways. "Hiss" is bare-chested post-punk, strutting across the stage, caked with sweat and fizzing with static interference. Deeper into the night, "Acid Minor" wrenches up the gear to explode into full-bore acid techno, with Clouse repeatedly hammering the brakes and triggering space itself to distort around you. This provocative yet playful approach has long been a defining characteristic of Clouse's music. Over the past decade he's gained a reputation for Shit & Shine's remarkable live shows -- mesmerizing blasts of rhythmic noise featuring multiple drummers -- as well as a string of albums exploring starker noise rock and industrial-infused sounds. His recent shift towards more club-centered music, then, makes sense. Both Powder Horn and his previous Diagonal EP further hone his fascination with the energizing effects of rhythm on the mind and body, while retaining the unpredictable and confrontational nature that's always made Shit & Shine such a wild proposition.