Shame are elusive again on their third studio album.
Talking about the 20th century idea of difficult albums is redundant now, but south Londoners Shame do seem to have a complicated relationship with their own music.
Their 2018 debut Songs Of Praise rightfully earned them much acclaim, but singer Charlie Steen was then quick to underplay its anthemic high point One Rizla on the grounds that they’d written it whilst barely out of school.
It was followed by the pandemic-written Drunk Tank Pink, whose abrasive post-punk contours sent listeners off on a largely fruitless search for melody. Difficult? Maybe not to record, but to sit down and hear, definitely yes.
Steen is rarely undersold, but as relative success transpired a conflict between who the band were and what they’d become contributed to panic attacks for him and the cancellation of a lengthy tour. The demoing of material that would end up as Food for Worms formed part of its resolution.
Here as a means of therapy the band’s management tasked them with playing a pair of intimate shows in which they’d debut two sets of entirely new songs; leaping at the chance, this white-knuckle return to basics created new impetus and, with veteran producer Flood brought on board, the resulting album came together in short time after.
One of its themes is human connectedness, Steen admitting: ‘I don’t think you can be in your own head forever…popular music is always about love, heartbreak, or yourself. There isn’t much about your mates.’
Opener Fingers Of Steel rips off the band aid; to an elbow jerking guitar riff the singer throws out, ‘It’s becoming a chore (Becoming a chore)/It’s becoming a waste of time, but I don’t mind’, in the general direction of someone who can’t zero in on their own problems.
The messages get starker but the relationships more complex, as on Alibis where Steen coldly observes, ‘I let my friends rise above me/And then I let them fall’, whilst the song drags through a maze of recrimination and lyrical feints, all in the space of just over two-and-a-half minutes.
There’s a lot going on here under this album’s many surfaces, but most of what this is will need to be figured out by you.
At times there’s a necessary degree of forgiveness too: recorded as live, the songs here are feeding off an energy that comes in real life from being in proximity to an audience, nose-to-nose.
That energy manifested here squirts and bursts in unexpected places, meaning some rough and uneven textures that jar most notably on the likes of Yankees and The Fall Of Paul.
There are all kinds of friendship. Sometimes it’s complicity, the guilt from being passive which flows through the drowsy Adderall, a track which starts out in the same torpor an addict might then rises after peering through the hazy lens of the situation’s own self defeat.
It would be equally worthless to describe much of this as post-punk or apply any kind of labels at all; singing about what means something to you more than the ephemera 21st century life consists of would expose anyone’s vulnerabilities.
This feat of hearing more from strangers but knowing nothing about them is exposed on the wah-wah heavy Six-Pack – a pinprick of almost normality – whilst Orchid could be a love song in disguise.
Food For Worms brings us no closer to understanding Shame than its awkward predecessor. On the edge of a horizon only they can seem to see, at least the comfort of friends is there to keep them warm.
