Shame - Songs of Praise

The Quietus

At a recent gig, Shame’s lead singer Charlie Steen took off all his clothes and jumped straight into the crowd without missing a beat or taking a breath. It’s a pleasure to report that the reckless abandon of those live shows has transferred seamlessly onto on their debut album. Right from opener ‘Dust On Trial’, Steen is strenuous, breathless, volatile. On second track ‘Concrete’ the band really get going, and we’re immersed in the call-and-response of the vocals. On ‘One Rizla’ Steen truly shines as a feral frontman on top of an effervescent bassline and sweet guitars. ‘Tasteless’ is more rampant, full of throaty yowls and feverish, frothing-at-the mouth energy. On ‘Gold Hole’, guitars and drums and vocals spiral downwards into a hellish soundscape of noise anarchy.

Shame’s lawless live energy, their highly politicised songwriting and their merry-go-round of raucous hedonism on and off stage has perhaps inevitably drawn comparisons with Fat White Family - and Shame are part of the south London scene that spawned Fat Whites. But they have also helped revive the good old ‘Is guitar music dead?’ debate; Shame are, undeniably and perhaps frustratingly, all white men and that tired old debate seems only to include bands of white men. (There has at least been a bit of a drop-off in the number of generic Reading & Leeds headliners who graced every cover of the NME a couple of years ago - Catfish & The Bottlemen, with Peace, Swim Deep, Circa Waves and Slaves riding on their coattails, all floundering in a diminishing gene pool borrowed from bands such as The Libertines and Arctic Monkeys.)

Shame have just about managed to distance themselves from the indie landfill of recent yesteryear, and not just by making better music. After a fight broke out at a recent gig they said, “It was fucking stupid and it shouldn’t have happened… Shame gigs are a safe place, we might beat ourselves up on stage but that’s it.” This is a band of lads working to avoid an aggro, lagers-in-the-moshpit fanbase. We’ve yet to see if they succeed, but right now Songs Of Praise is an ambitious, ferocious debut from a band who might just have something new to say about being a (load of white men in a) guitar band.

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The Guardian 80

(Dead Oceans)

Emerging from the same snot-encrusted, verruca-sock culture of south-east London that bred Fat White Family, this group of articulate, sarcastic but impassioned young men are the ones most likely to cross over into traditional indie circles: there’s a Stone Roses-style naive melody on Friction, and Angie is the kind of epic that closed Britpop albums. But there’s also seething post-punk that recalls early Fugazi, and the lyrics – full of blood, spunk and dirt – are far too jaded and contradictory to make for easy indie-disco fodder. They’re delivered by supremely charismatic frontman Charlie Steen, pitching his delivery between Bullingdon and borstal. As well as his brilliantly smart-arse stream of consciousness on The Lick, the peak is the single One Rizla, where teenage gripes and insecurities cohere into grownup emotional clarity, Steen yelling “you’re clinging to conflict / just let go!” as a massive anthem surges behind him.

Pitchfork 75

On their debut album, the UK rock group separates themselves from their peers, imbuing their post-adolescent rage with wit and, crucially, a self-effacing awareness that they may never succeed.

Drowned In Sound 50

When we have the taut, minimal rage of Idles, the self-possessed political punk of Dream Wife and the situationist rock’n’roll debauchery of The Moonlandingz, the bar is high for a new voice looking to make a mark. Shame are aware that the platform of a debut album is an opportunity, but the execution lacks imagination.

The Brixton five-piece formed three years ago in the same rehearsal space that spawned Fat White Family, and they came up in a community that included Goat Girl, HMLTD and the dearly departed Dead Pretties. This debut album arrives sooner than that of any of those scene-mates and does encapsulate the broiling, discontented energy that binds those bands together. Singles ‘One Rizla’ and ‘Concrete’, for example, are driven by sharp, impatient dual guitar licks and acerbic, scowling vocals from Charlie Steen. They resist obvious boozy, shout-a-long-able choruses too, which is a bonus. But the tunes that propel Goat Girl, the formal experiments that define HMLTD and the blues rock power that spearheaded Dead Pretties are all absent, as is an equivalent defining feature of their own.

At their most successful, they find a dark, menacing mood that fits their voice and sound, most strongly on ‘Dust On Trial’, which sees Steen’s black gothic vocals and Sean Coyle-Smith’s unrelenting anger-chiming guitars combine to create a creeping, intimidating final product. For a band that do not have the instinct to make their music pretty, this is a satisfyingly ugly opener.

They do strive to have something to say and it coagulates into a statement most impressively on ‘The Lick’. Over a lead guitar line that falls somewhere between a prowl and a strut, Steen speak-sings, “So why don’t you sit in the corner of your room/And download the next greatest track to your MP3 device/So sincerely recommended to you by the New Musical Express,” before continuing to implore us to take it to our friends’ place and to sit and marvel at our “four chord future”, because “that’s what we need/something we can feel/something that’s relatable not debatable”. Steen’s deadpan delivery might even be dry enough to convince us that this could be a good idea, were it not for the fact that he had started the song by detailing a trip to the gynaecologist with a “golden ticket hanging out of my pocket”. Shame are having fun here, and this tale of the way we consume our music is no celebration.

Elsewhere, the one time they succumb to an earworm-able tune with ‘Friction’ is welcome, with Steen reading out a list of wry soul-searching questions that could have existed on an early Scroobius Pip release. But as is true throughout Songs of Praise, the little variety we get in lyrical content is not reflected musically. As a recording band, they exist within a narrow stream, neither daring to dabble with more colourful textures, nor mastering the essence of their own simplicity. It is, ultimately, an unimaginative album from a promising band. Better records may lie ahead for them, but for now they will struggle to reach far beyond their existing fanbase.