The Shits // Kafé Hærverk

Let’s face facts here; we’re all a mess. Life in the 2020s thus far has been a
litany of crushing indignities at best. Living standards plummet, lies carry the
same currency as truth, and rock music - that racket that once served as
countercultural force and revolutionary fire - has been neutered and
subsumed into nullity.
That’s unless you’re listening to The Shits. ‘You’re A Mess’ - the second
album from Leeds’ filthiest sons - is a staggering assault of invective fit to
reignite your ire, and a sound that constitutes a real and present threat to life
and limb. Contained within these eight feral exorcisms is a merciless assault
of Stoogian/stygian riffage, gloriously purgatorial abjection and intimidating
aggro that takes a garage-rock blueprint and grinds its face in the dirt.
If these grimy dirges and salvos of horror have a precedent, it’s in the
menacing audial lineage that connects Fun House through the AmRep label,
Brainbombs and Drunk In Hell - the process where relentless negativity
is alchemically transformed into profane primal salvation. Yet The Shits
worship no heroes, obeying a thanatotic urge that sees no separation
between death and glory.
Listen to this album and you will believe once again in catharsis by way of
heavy amplification. Psych-rock is dead, and The Shits are the executioners.
Assume the position.
The Quietus’s John Doran says this about the album:
“Terrible, terrible bastards The Shits are here with all the spiritually uplifting,
life affirming, serotonin boosting properties of a dark amber, ammonia
stinking, three-day rave piss, in the form of new transmission, You’re A Mess.
Starting with a bludgeoning, left of centre, Amphetamine Reptile punk
take on The Stooges that laughs in the face of more recent flat white￾sipping, pantywaisted post rock and post hardcore innovations and
instead concentrates on a caustic, clangorous, bone-cracking assault
on all that is right and proper. But steady your nerve, delve into their
metallic, acid stripped, pig-fuck grooves and you will find a chaotic world
of inverted psychedelia and jet black – fucking appalling – enlightenment
waiting for you.” John Doran