17 Mar 2015

More reviews of Shit & Shine's 54 Synth-Brass, 38 Metal Guitar, 65 Cathedral


Muso's Guide

At last the search for the best album title ever is over.  A wonderful album named 54 Synth-Brass, 38 Metal Guitar, 65 Cathedral is offered up from the equally wonderfully named band Shit And Shine.

The album title goes some way to describe the onslaught of sound which this band project. The band is the brainchild of Craig Clouse, a Texas-based musician who sounds like some old school mad German scientist. Clouse has assembled a collection of like-minded individuals to produce ear-splitting industrial sounds.

Make no mistake that this is a straight up dance album. What is different however, is the avalanche of twisted electronica. The first two tracks ‘Electric Pony 2’ and ‘C2-6’ at ten minutes in length find Clouse pumping out industrial basslines mixed with a weird and wonderful array of distortions. These opening tracks carve out hypnotic soundscapes with more than a hint of krautrock inspiration.

Read full review: Muso's Guide



The Vinyl Factory

Craig Clouse’s $hit And $hine project continues its decade long evolution from nosebleed inducing, double-drumming noise rock to distantly leftfield dancefloor insanity with this latest LP on Bristolian psyche imprint Rocket. The cough syrup slurping Texan feeds motorik rhythms, Warp-esque glitches and malfunctioning keyboards through the old distorto 2000 to create a driving six tracker of breathless, boundless intensity and sonic experimentation. If the mirror ball wrecking antics of ‘DIAG004′ and ‘Find Out What Happens…’ saw a glitter-tinted Clouse in Studio 54, this latest record plunges the musician into the underground dancefloors of East Germany 1984 for a taste of the dark, wired sound.

Read in Full: The Vinyl Factory



This Year in Music

Shit and Shine don’t make pop music. On their latest album 54 Synth-Brass, 38 Metal Guitar, 65 Cathedral they’ve have crafted 50 minutes of droney repetitive beats with wonky vocals that not only pushes the listeners boundaries but questions what is music? While this is quite a grandiose statement, and like all grandiose statements, there is an element of truth to it.

Since their inception in the mid-2000’s Shit and Shine ($&$) founder Craig Clouse has been able to mix garage rock with elements of drone, Krautrock and the Avant-Garde. At their heart they are a psychedelic band though. Their music shares more in common with Loud Reed’s much maligned Metal Machine Music, than Kaleidoscope’s Tangerine Dream. It is heavy, unrelenting but with surprisingly catchy moments...

Read the full review: This Year in Music

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