SHIT AND SHINE
MALIBU LIQUOR STORE -LTD-
Craig Clouse - the Austin-based sage of the aurally unclean also known as Shit & Shine ' has been busily channelling the interface between the surroundings and his own wayward muse into 'Malibu Liquor Store' ' a lockdown-birthed psychic landscape mapped out in the first half of this turbulent year. The only expectation any relatively well-adjusted person should have of Shit & Shine remains the unexpected at this stage, with Clouse having released well over thirty records on multiple labels ' just as comfortable with both bloody-minded electronic assaults and noiserock-driven dirge, as adept at kraut-hammered rhythmic mantras as dancefloor-friendly abstraction. 'Malibu Liquor Store' is none of these things exactly yet simultaneously flirts cheerily and irreverently with all of them. Always shot through with gleeful humour, this is a sonic world that recognises neither boundaries nor common sense.. Co-ordinates and reliable audial landmarks are rendered meaningless as the title cut comes on like a '60s Morricone chase sequence reassembled in new electronic shapes like lysergically-assisted Meccano. 'Rat Snake' sees the humid grooves of Can's 'Soon Over Babaluma' bludgeoned into delirious submission. 'Devil's Backbone' witnesses Buttholes-esque transgressions of the '80s beamed forward Terminator-style to a cyborg-ridden dystopia, and the glorious skeletal groove of album centrepiece 'Hillbilly Moonshine' meanwhile is nothing less than workout music for the damned ' a relentless and pulsating soundtrack for a generation of ghouls mounting a legion of rowing machines along a metaphysical river Styx. 01. Malibu Liquor Store 02. Rat Snake 03.Sheriff of Yates Hill 04.Cream Tea 05.Chervette 06.Hillbilly Moonshine 07.Devil's Backbone 08.Barbara and Woodrow |