South London’s Shame head up our list of irresisitble LPs

Shame – Food For Worms (Dead Oceans)
When South London’s finest released Drunk Tank Pink at the beginning of 2021, the non-starter year of lifting and reinstating restrictions, the brakes would be constantly halted throughout the entire album cycle. Following up their acclaimed debut with a work deeply rooted in anxiety, alienation and lack of purpose, seemed a rather fitting soundtrack to such turbulent times, yet the inability to road test the new material in any full scale capacity would have lingering effects.

Figuring out which angle to best approach their latest endeavour proved trying with the group constantly second guessing themselves and kicking around the notion of the dreaded “writer’s block”. That was until their label, Dead Oceans, stepped in with an ultimatum: The band would return to their old watering hole (The Windmill in Brixton), to unveil newly written material for a select number of attendees…in just two weeks. The experiment proved a resounding success as the increased pressure and deadline forced the members to do away with notions of sonic cohesion, or whether those who praised their previous turn towards the dark would be left underwhelmed. Instead, they found themselves back in the simple mindset of crafting new songs for nothing more than the requirement of having enough to fill a set.

All of these surrounding factors are vital when unpacking the creative stride Shame have hit on LP3. From the ominous opening keys of, ‘Fingers Of Steel’, it becomes quickly evident that the fidgety post-punk of its predecessor has been streamlined into a more restrained dynamic. As the track slowly swells and frontman Charlie Steen introduces the proceedings with the singular self-jab – “You’re complaining a lot about the things that you’ve got”, a more mature headspace comes into view. If Drunk Tank Pink was the exorcism or catharsis that needed to happen, then the ten cuts that make up Food For Worms are the resulting odes to making it out of the fire intact. 

Just as a pattern begins to form, the absurd overkill psychedelic riffage of, ‘Six-Pack’, removes any signposts with its Hendrix indebted squall, while Steen’s trademark eccentricities are left utterly untethered. Yes, they may detest the vague post-punk label, or wince at the thought of being stereotypically compared to The Smiths, but it’s almost impossible to ignore the influence that seeps from the jangling menace of ‘Yankees’, with its spoken word poetic verses giving way to an anthemic hook so fuzzy and emotive, even Morrissey might claim it as his own. 

‘Alibis’ toes the closest line to the despondent tone of their last record, but with a frenetic dance-punk twist, whereas ‘Aderall’ serves as both the midpoint and standout track; a nineties grunge tinted ballad, complete with lackadaisical gang vocals teeming with brotherly camaraderie, while Steen’s sobering declaration to an absentee friend lost to the throes of addiction – “Your parents really miss you”, is as universally relatable as it is deeply crushing. 

Things take a noticeably darker turn in the second leg with, ‘The Fall Of Paul’, and the sardonic, ‘Different Person’, which echoes the lengthy no wave dirges from DTP such as ‘Snow Day’, and ‘Station Wagon’, but with a trade-off of nihilism for more increased cynicism, which sums up the project’s attitude adjustment rather succinctly. 

While not a total departure or rebirth, Food For Worms is the sound of a band getting out of their own way, and allowing the material to be the guide.  Working with renowned producer, Mark ‘Flood’ Ellis, who helped to execute an entirely live recording process; the resulting cacophony manages to feel joyful, sarcastic, elated, weary and acceptant, packaged within subtle sonic restraint, yet delivered with fluid musicianship. By rediscovering their initial adoration for the joy of craft and performance, while approaching their work with newfound maturity and a seasoned worldview, Luton’s finest finally sound like themselves, and make no apologies for it. 

ZB

Gruff Rhys – The Almond And The Seahorse – Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (Rough Trade)

The tug of Super Furry Animals remains strong nearly a decade and a half after the release of ‘Dark Days/Light Years’, their ninth and final studio album. Being in a band like that buys you a lot of goodwill. A lot. Not that the quality of Gruff Rhys’ output as a solo artist requires much goodwill to be taken into account. Since ‘Yr Atal Genhedlaeth’, his 2005 solo debut, he’s proved as much of a treasure as his former band, which is no mean feat.

This isn’t his first swing at a film soundtrack. He scored 2014’s ‘Set Fire To The Stars’ about Dylan Thomas, and ‘American Interior’ in the same year consisted of a film, album, book and, erm, phone app so he has form and it shows.

Starring Rebel Wilson and Charlotte Gainsbourg, ‘The Almond And The Seahorse’ follows the lives of two couples dealing with anterograde amnesia, a traumatic brain injury that inhibits the ability to create new memories. The OST is a whopper, clocking in at 22 tracks across four sides of vinyl where original songs come interspersed with the instrumental score.

The haunting melody of ‘Amen’ was written before Gruff was even engaged on the project. “The yearning and frustration of the song seemed to fit the themes of the film perfectly,” he offers. The track forms a recurring motif throughout the film and reappears in several guises throughout the soundtrack – as a waltz, with strings, staccato, and on ‘Love Love Love’ – with the film being set in Merseyside – a tribute to The Beatles featuring a Mellotron, ‘Strawberry Fields’ style.

‘Layer Upon Layer’, a breezy three-minute power pop blast that plays under the film’s opening sequence, is straight out of the SFA songbook and wouldn’t have be out of place on ‘Radiator’. ‘The Brain And The Body’, which samples Wilson’s dialogue is especially striking as it explains the condition at the heart of the drama. The closing trio of tracks, ‘Ffenestr’, ‘Penbedw’ and ‘Arogldarth’, make up a 20-minute suite of cracking synth-fuelled instrumentals on their own – the eight-minute ebb and flow of the latter is especially good.

As all good soundtracks should be, ‘The Almond And The Seahorse’ feels like a proper journey. And a rewarding listen. But then this is Gruff Rhys, what’s not to like.

NM

No Pressure – No Pressure (Triple B)
Hardcore adjacent pop-punk supergroup, No Pressure, started life as little more than an outlet for guitarist Pat Kennedy (Light Years), and drummer Harry Corrigan (Regulate), to craft material that reminded them of their youth, with bands such as Blink-182, Millencollin and Lifetime serving as vital inspiration.

When time came to search for a vocalist, they found a like-minded ideology in The Story So Far frontman, Parker Cannon, who had become increasingly disillusioned with his own group’s expanded platform and frequenting of bigger venues; pining for the sweaty, cluttered club experience that birthed his original path.

With the agreed attitude of “no pressure” which become the moniker for the project as well as their exceptional self-titled EP, a groundswell of support grew from fans of all members’ surrounding outfits, who clearly yearned for the energetic, sugar coated bombast of classic pop-punk; a scene diluted by its own mass exposure thanks in no small part to bandwagon hoppers such as Machine Gun Kelly.

In the span of less than two years, what started as barely a side-project has ballooned into a constantly touring juggernaut, embraced by the hardcore community for its malleability with regards to how the most aggressive aspects of the genre can be repurposed for the catchiest of means.

Last year’s debut full-length makes good on all of their initial promise with a tight ten track affair, clocking in at just under twenty-three minutes. Crisp and clear whilst evading the dreaded over-produced sheen, the band manage to distil the ferocity of hardcore, the vulnerability of emo and the instantaneous hooks of pop-punk into a potent formula which feels both fresh and nostalgic.

Rapid fire drumming, two-step grooves and twinkling, fuzzed out riffs bounce around Cannon’s deeply personal ruminations on failed relationships, bitterness between old friends, and the passing of his father. From the heartfelt sincerity of, ‘Hand In Hand’, to the sardonic pissed off, ‘Big Man’, all the way to the Blink-182 indebted standout, ‘Both Sides’, (with a bass tone lifted right out of the Enema Of The State playbook), No Pressure prove that they’re far more than the sum of their parts with an expertly crafted, precise, endearing, endlessly playful yet cathartic batch of anthems, destined to become genre classics in the near future.  

ZB

Philip Selway – Strange Things (Bella Union)

The third long-form odyssey from Philip Selway packs serious names on the credits. Laura Moody, Hannah Peel, Adrian Utley, Quinta, and Valentina Magaletti have all contributed their talent to Strange Things, a record of undulating beauty and epic scope.

Regardless of what you think that should sound like, though, for the main man behind it this was always going to be an album imagined as Carole King collaborating with BBC Radiophonic Workshop co-founder and UK electronica pioneer Daphne Blake Oram. Selway, apparently, is invited to have a go on the drums.

So far as visions go, that’s pretty specific, and may not be exactly the main thing on your mind here. Instead, from opener ‘Little Things’ through to the tender yet gradually rousing closing number, ‘There’ll Be Better Days’, the first impression is consistently one of incredible lyrical and musical depth. A masterclass not just in songwriting, but arrangement, which, although patient to a T, sits in an end of aural grandeur that’s somehow powerful but soft.

Big and often pretty complex designs somehow presented in stunning tracks small enough to keep in your breast pocket — close to your heart as possible. From subdued twinkling keys gradually bursting into string overture on ‘What Keeps You Awake At Night’, to the garage-pop of ‘Picking Up Pieces’, a track that feels lo-fi and yet is as layered and rich as they come, Selway once again proves himself to be a master at gauging balance, realising incredibly bold ideas in ways that turn relatively leftfield, unconventional tunes into things you could easily imagine hearing on mainstream radio or TV segments. Whether he wants either of those is another question entirely. The point being, Strange Things evokes a sorely missed time, when popular music was as sophisticated as it was daring, complicated, and artistic.

MH

Descendents – Milo Goes To College (New Alliance)

In the late seventies/early eighties, the punk scene was surrounded on all sides by leather jacket sporting mohawks with a predilection towards hard drugs and violence. Deep in Manhattan Beach, California though, was a group of young, nerdy friends who saw through all of the posturing and realised that the punk ethos was for the true outcasts, not the trend-followers who were drawn to the allure of apparent debauchery.

Before drummer Bill Stevenson would embark on his touring tenure with Black Flag, and before frontman Milo Auckerman would depart for college to study biology, Descendents released their iconic debut full-length in 1982, aptly titled, ‘Milo Goes To College’. At twenty-one minutes in length, with fifteen tracks often barely scraping over the two or even one minute mark, many cite the project as the true birth of pop-punk.

Imbuing the frenzied energy and brevity of hardcore with ear worm hooks, and a lyrical stance tackling far more adolescent suburban issues such as clashing with parents, being overworked, and (of course) unrequited love; the album proved that punk didn’t have to be about taking on the world while being off your face and never showering. It could be a means for youthful angst and aggression to be exorcised with positive reinforcement and executed with a nod and a smile.

The utter disdain and wit that seeps through, ‘I’m Not A Loser’, the complete dissection of all that’s wrong with the punk scene on the clustered, ‘Tonyage’, or the carefree humour of, ‘Catalina’, or the questionable, ‘Kabuki Girl’, are offset with moments of earnest, lovelorn, teenage passion on the standout legacy cut, ‘Hope’, or the tragic closer, ‘Jean Is Dead.’

With a bass guitar tone blueprint unaltered more than four decades on, and an attitude bordering on incel, snot-nosed angst with morsels of true enlightenment scattered throughout, 1982 will always be remembered as the year Descendents reared their geeky head and changed the trajectory (or rather charted the course) of pop-punk forever.  

ZB

En Attendant Ana – Principia (Trouble In Mind)

Apparently built from confusion and dismay at the world we live in today, Principia effortlessly bucks the trend for outrage at The State of All This Shit by simultaneously calling out some of the biggest social ills of our age — not least the obsession with individualism at any expense, despite nobody actually knowing who they really are, and the isolation and pain this results in — while romancing us with these sexy and sophisticated songs. Quite the achievement when you think about it.

That said, we expected nothing less from En Attendant Ana. The band are from Paris, a place that seems incapable of giving birth to anyone or anything lacking in seduction skills. And when it comes to music, that trait is on another level. Instrumentally, things are wonderfully, captivatingly tight, paying homage to the structures and discipline of classic garage rock with audible touches of golden era roll, and shades of Gallic artistry. All wrapped around the more-than-perfect voice of lead singer and principal songwriter Margaux Bouchaudon — a talent we have surely all dreamed about watching on stage in the one of the French capital’s abundant late night live music dives — it’s familiar stuff, but difficult to find fault.

MH

No Spill Blood – Eye Of Night (Svart)
Irish self-proclaimed “synth-heft” trio, No Spill Blood, have finally made their epic return following a near decade absence since the release of 2015’s hypnotising debut Heavy Electricity.

A supergroup of sorts with their members teeth already firmly chipped and cut in seminal acts such as Elk, Hands Up Who Wants To Die, and The Magic Pockets, the band first rose to prominence with their immense Street Meat EP in 2013, while their place on the ever-expanding roster of Sargent House seemed to dissolve once original drummer, Lar Kaye (Adebisi Shank, All Tvvins) would make his departure.

Finding a new, apt label-home on Svart appears to have been the ideal partnership once delving into the cosmic nightmare that is Eye Of Night. Leaning further into their doom-metal angles than ever before, the neon-strewn hellscapes conjure an atmosphere as bestial and Lovecraftian as they are cavernous.

From the squelching, acidic synths of the cryptic intro track, ‘Cradle Scythe’, it feels abundantly clear that this is the work No Spill Blood have always strived towards. Be it the Cliff Martinez Drive soundtrack on peyote energy of ‘Unguem’, or the Mastodon scoring an 80’s arcade game electro fury of the title-track, the trio’s synth/bass cluster bombs make for a lysergic fusion of visceral rage, hallucinogenic electronics and devastating brutality.

Devoid of any use of guitars, this is arguably the heaviest project of 2023 (easily thus far) to eschew the instrument entirely in search of bombastic heft redefined and reimagined through distorted, fuzzed out bass tones and Tangerine Dream level synth lines. Furious, heavy, and trudging, yet performed with a calculated sense of eccentric, euphoric whimsy; No Spill Blood make their boldest claim yet on this long overdue sophomore effort, elevating and honing everything about the trio’s unique dynamic to an incomparable height of cacophonous bedlam.

ZB

Miss Grit – Follow the Cyborg (Mute)

Margaret Sohn chose the name of their debut full length well. Identity is perhaps more important to this artist than many, or less relevant, it’s hard to tell. Non-binary, and mixed heritage (Korean-American), whether they consider conversations around gender and ethnicity as distractions, or have made purposeful decisions to engage with those discussions, isn’t clear.

Either way, Follow The Cyborg conjures images of characters free from the weight of such human-made constructs, paving a way to a future that may or may not include us. It depends on how quickly we can stop fighting over those constructs and focus on challenges that must be overcome.

In many ways, Miss Grit’s inaugural long player sounds like that. Straddling tones that include garage rock, dark, mutated pop, synth, late-night soft-kissed keys, lo-fi electronica, it’s not that the artist, and record, don’t know what they want to be, but more a bold statement that we can actually be whatever we choose, all at once, now and forever. In this instance, that’s a cyborg — with the songs here attempting to tell the story and convey the experiences of a cybernetic organism — but anyone not reading multiple layers into that probably needs to listen closer. 

MH

This week’s reviewers: Zach Buggy, Martin Hewitt, Neil Mason.