Shit And Shine - Total Shit! - LP Vinyl

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 (REPOSE 052LP, 2016), this one is a return to the heavy truckin' styles last heard on Everybody's A Fuckin Expert with Editions Mego (EMEGO 212CD/LP, 2015) 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.

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