shit & shine: total shit!

Bubbling up from his post-everything cesspit, Shit And Shine cups another killer album boff to the grill of Diagonal with Total $hit!, his second LP and third full release for Powell and Jaime Williams's indomitable imprint. A rancid ruck of rock 'n roll and industrial entrails squeezed for sustenance and sploshed with classic '80s disco, Total $hit! is nothing if not a definitive Craig Clouse record; insistently playful, scatty, and demented, in equal measures, but with a couldn't care less attitude that's always refreshing and welcome. Following his grind-core lash Teardrops for Riot Season, this one is a return to the heavy truckin' styles last heard on Everybody's A Fuckin Expert with Editions Mego and Good White Good Green for Glasgow's Heated Heads (2016), depositing nine examples of his nonchalant style at its most distended, unsettling, and, funnily enough, its most funked-up and effective. He makes a big entrance with the blind-drunk swagger of "Hot Shovel" trammeling rabid tribal drums, grunts and pitched voices in a febrile hot mess, before "Chklt Shk" possibly betrays his no f**ks attitude with some of his canniest, adroit tweaks applied to what sounds like Anthony Shakir and MMM fighting over the last cubicle after a plate of bad seafood, then it's back to twisted smiles and buckie-sloshing skank with the acrid disco nip of "Long Island City". The record's longest, murkiest section follows with the Jacko-shampling "Dodge Pot" dispensing a slimy hot streak of flatulent mongrel boogie that perhaps outstays its welcome, hence the entrance of two squabbling lasses who tell it where to go, which leaves us with a version of the recumbent coke standard "White Horse" ready for the knacker's yard, plus a trio of saltier, off-the-wrist jags that only serve to agitate and infect the sore he's been prodding at 'til this point. Let's be fair: Total $hit! is not big or clever but, it is messy and fun; like the soundtrack to a lock-in at a boozer exclusively full of mad c*nts who were chucked out of every other place. RIYL: Xão Seffcheque, Mika Vainio, Beau Wanzer, Powell. Artwork by Guy Featherstone. Mastered by Matt Colton. Edition of 500.