Blame your favourite conspiracy theory, but whatever happened to regional identity in music?
It’s just too easy now to sound like you come from somewhere when you’re from a million miles away, an opportunity for counterfeiting which creepy American silicon-fascists and their perfect teeth are trying to convince everyone is progress.
Wherever you can get the internet this extinction level event has been almost total; there’s no chance, for instance, now for a movement like heavy metal taking root in the industrialised West Midlands as it did in the 1970s, of Wigan’s Northern Soul scene flourishing in tribal secrecy, or experiencing the nascent throb of Sheffield’s electronic pioneers, autodidacts brewing in council sponsored art spaces and making weird, experimental music to soundtrack JG Ballard novels.
Shame are a quintet from South London who grew up in a micro-squall of young bands and old lags congregated at Brixton’s Queen’s Head pub, the sometime rehearsal space of fellow gleeful provocateurs Fat White Family and home for them for over a year before the venue’s spit and sawdust cultural petri-dish was turned into a millennial gastropub hell.
Chips served on a trowel isn’t the thing which fuels the rage behind Songs Of Praise’s ten chunks of transgressive and often darkly humorous post genre racket, but still barely in their twenties, Shame are as highly politicised as many of their generation are apathetic. This activism has spawned caricaturing piss takes like the sadly omitted Visa Vulture – full of highly graphical references to Theresa May – but even the in-jokery fails to dull them as otherwise brightly bitter disassemblers of a society at the mercy of a macro-greedy few.
Hearts on sleeves is an approach wide open to patronising, centrist-Dad odes to caution, but in answer raspy lead singer Charlie Steen growls during the anthem-to-be One Rizla “you choose to hate my words/but do I give a f**k”, in doing so making a statement, not asking a question. Steen and the rest of band’s hubristic veneer is a feint, but each song is a concise journey into their minds, from the psychological contortions thrown up on Concrete to The Lick’s sleazy, hilarious strip club blues, the catchphrase “relatable, not debateable” telling the gushing, bearded tech-tards that their possessions are f***ing as well as owning them.
“Our music is about wanting to provoke something,” Steen says, the most utterly no-shit statement heard in rock for many a year. Clearly, you don’t do that by making easy choices, and rather than hiring some of the safer pairs of hands to do the job, Songs Of Praise was produced by Dan Foat and Nathan Boddy, long standing figures in the techno world dealing with a band for the first time. Both, he says, obsessed over Martin Hannett’s auteurial work with Joy Division and the Happy Mondays, a force self evident on the chiming, treble soaked guitar of Friction, a Bummed-era sleazoid rolling groove that connects a mains circuit cable back into Madchester’s sleeping Frankenstein.
You sense Shame are the sort of outfit Tony Wilson would’ve made his blood brothers without a second thought; the avaricious girl of Gold Hole prised apart by a grimy Stooges-esque rasp is a lost cause without knowing it, whilst seven-minute closer Angie shows they’re more than just some polemical Cockney one trick pony ripping off Joe and Mark E. and Ian; a love song, a comedown and the end of the party all at once, it’s the blurriest of brilliant full stops.
Far be it from us to be as pushy as calling this the earliest possible contender for album of the year – and yet, we are. Because back in the times before the sneering old men robbed the nineties born of their art, their dole and their dignity, there were a load of bands that made the Northern industrial wastelands what they were, a habitat of dry post-romantic articulation set to music that Metropolitanism couldn’t fathom or give a f**k about.
Wilson would be ecstatic to hear Songs Of Praise though, final proof that the chaos, ethics and brittle self-esteem of a landslide he began can now grow anywhere. Shame have just brought everyone a little closer to each other.
The south has risen again.
