Leeds Stoogian noiseniks The Shits released their debut album Punishment in early 2020, a time when such a gruelling, discordant axe of ire was incredibly resonant. More recently, the loud and proud, buzzsaw riff-extraordinaires signed to Rocket Recordings. Fittingly, The Shits sit somewhere between the heaviness occasionally extracted by Rocket stalwarts like Gnod and Sex Swing. However, displayed across Punishment spectacularly, The Shits’ issue a pure primordial heaviness. The album is an almost singular slab of dense, sonorous drone-y doom metal, replete with almost painfully cutting guitar and acupuncture-like stabs of feedback. This level of punishment – partly from the sustained droning thrum – isn’t relentlessly rending though, more intensely…
…satisfying; the bombast-filled drums and general barnstorming noise take the aural form of a dominatrix, the band ratcheting the inflamed attacks to the perfect gauge of painful pleasure. Such a quality also comes from their incredibly neat melodies and riffs, belied by the chaos of the tracks, as well as the drone-y behemoth they regularly settle into. These are absurdly addictive, nearly soporific hurricanes similar to Sonic Youth’s, but with added grit.
For better and for worse, this formula largely continues on new album You’re a Mess. Mundanity is mostly avoided though; the above characteristics kept, while intensified fire and celerity is added to the caterwauling drone-fused spree.
Opener In My Hotel Room is the biggest divergence on the album (and also among the best); yet, like a rebuke to naysayers’ criticism of the first album’s repetition, it isn’t totally different. Instead it ploughs ahead with gorgeously dirty filth for the rest of the album. Said opener crawls languidly in a percussion-fuelled build-up – in a tumultuous dynamic hitherto unknown for the band – before the tension fulminates into more familiar but ear-bruising territory that puts barbed wire drums and bass parts amid Sleep-like guitar scythes.
Like its predecessor, The Shits’ mete out even more musical welts here. Among the bloodiest: the aptly titled Bludgeoned to Death, the guitar grooves/feedback orgy of lead single Waiting and the rollocking dynamics on Ugly, Worthless; lightning-fast tempo surges to sludgy lope and back again really rock the brain. The vocals are an excellent death metal growl, especially on the riotous Alone II and the James Williamson shredding of the title track. Though they are sufficiently guttural, the incandescent vocals don’t require any deciphering; like a death metal town crier, their decrees against modernity and more are clear. Flooded with speed, the album lands suddenly into the epic delirium of the closer. Most of these, and more, sound like the type of grimy noise excluded from Black Flag’s Slip It In for being too ridiculously filthy.
Once again, The Shits expunge traces of today’s tepid post-punk; simultaneously, they also expound more on the woeful contemporary world their music has thus far healed (and drilled) minds from. Though only minor changes distinguish You’re a Mess from their first album, The Shits go far beyond charges of going stale, their unfettered heaviness, refined songwriting, sustained repetition and drone-quality ensuring a headbanging, holistic constant that makes You’re a Mess a truly therapeutic album. Plus, it will have likely pelted your psyche with so much wrought anger that it won’t matter too much; only the cathartic aftermath you’re left with will. — louderthanwar.com