Shit & Shine

Total Shit!

Bubbling up from his post-everything cesspit, $hit & $hine cups another killer album boff to the grill of Diagonal with Total $hit!, his 2nd LP and 3rd full release for Powell and Jaime Williams’ 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 around these parts.

Following his grindcore lash Teardrops for Riot Season, this one is a return to the heavy truckin’ styles last heard on Everybody’s A Fuuckin Expert with Mego and the Good White Good Green for Glasgow’s Heated Heads, 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 trammelling 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.