SHIT AND SHINE – Jealous of Shit and Shine (Riot Season)
Posted: November 9th, 2006, by Graeme WilliamsAfter listening to this album by the London bass and drums duo Shit and Shine (think Merzbeat, not Lightning Bolt) a few times, I can say the following about it: Jealous of Shit and Shine contains a one-riff, thirty minute long cover version of “Practicing To Be A Doctor” by the Strangulated Beatoffs.Sure, this is obvious to anyone looking at the track listing on the CD, but this fact alone tells you pretty much all you need to know about what you’re about to hear. About ten minutes into that song I wanted it to be over; by the end of it, I thought it ended too soon. There’s a fuckedness here that only rarely makes it to record.It makes me think of the VU on “Sister Ray”, the band barely managing to keep it together but the song working precisely because of this, or perhaps the sheer pill-induced audacity of Dylan Carson and Dave Harwell letting a single chord ring out for half an hour at the end of Earth 2, or maybe the monotonous riffery of Skullflower’s Exquisite Fucking Boredom. Not that Shit and Shine sound like any of these bands, but they share the same mentality as them.It’s sloppy, it’s dirty, it’s probably completely unlistenable to most sane people, it certainly doesn’t belong in polite society, but somehow, buried somewhere deep within there, there is the pure essence of rock n roll in all its retarded glory.