Jan 18

Jan 18 Album Review: Shame - Songs of Praise

It probably gets tiring fast for bands to be constantly written about in terms of their youth, but with Shame it’s hard to avoid it. It’s writ large from their tongue-in-cheek debut album title Songs Of Praise (ripping from the long-running BBC Sunday hymnal broadcast), the barely post-pubescent faces that adorn their pig-hugging front cover, and especially in the music itself that rages from first second to last burning the fuel of their jejunity for all its worth. The genesis of the group comes from an extra-long summer break between their final two years of secondary school when they were just looking for a way to blow off steam, and soon found themselves as the nucleus of an up-and-coming South London rock scene. In hearing or seeing them play you can understand why others were drawn to them; they have an immediate magnetism born out of their in-your-face sound, undeniable chemistry and sonic propulsion – and they’ve carried this into their debut album.

It’s clear from the moment opener ‘Dust On Trial’ blasts off that Shame have cultivated a momentum in their music that drives throughout Songs Of Praise and could easily see them riding out these songs in a live setting for a couple of years to come. But, it’s pretty clear in both their interviews and their songwriting that Shame wouldn’t want to do this - they are the definition of restless and have a work ethic to go with it. This gives songs like the self-effacing ‘One Rizla’ or the fuming ‘Friction’ the feeling of teetering on the edge of something; singer Charlie Steen is full-throated throughout, and even if you haven’t seen their riotous live act you instinctively know that he’s staggering around as he howls, the wind ejected from his lungs taking it all out of him. One of Steen’s favourite tricks is to repeat lines ten or more times, making aphorisms like “I like you better when you’re not around” from ‘Tasteless’, or “my tongue will never get tired” from ‘Lampoon’, gain steam and venom with each reiteration, until it almost inevitably ends in a full-blooded howl and an explosive musical thrust. These brilliantly wayward vocalisms are kept in check by plundering guitar riffs, propulsive rhythms and a tangible auditory determination from the quintet, acting as a single-minded beast with a natural knack for building anthems.

At times their youth does topple into immaturity, as on ‘The Lick’ where Steen adopts a spoken-word drawl and delights in revealing “So in the last week I’ve made several trips to the gy-no-cologist,” wringing every bit of schoolboy puerility out of that last word. Elsewhere on ‘Gold Hole’ their idea to tell the story of a prostitute is a little too on-the-nose with lines like “She wants the money/ it comes with his cream.” However, in these instances, that ever-dynamic rock sound manages to carry you onwards without giving you too much time to stop and question.

What Shame do is not particularly original, it’s as though they’ve taken the hugeness of Ride, stuffed it into a dingy pub setting and hired Ian Dury’s other son as their singer – but it absolutely works. When they do manage to hit the sweet spot of brandishing their youth as a weapon rather than allowing it to undermine their ideas, the result is intoxicating. The frustrated yearning for escape on ‘Concrete’, the cocksure and honest self-examination of ‘One Rizla’, and the earnest desire of towering closer ‘Angie’ – to name a few – all prove that Shame have a lot more going for them than a lot of the other bands in the “lad rock” movement that they will inevitably be lumped into. They’re certainly lads, and they certainly rock, but Songs Of Praise is much more about self-expression and determination, and doesn’t look for any kind of gratification – it just sounds like a bunch of young men looking to blow off steam, and that is what makes it such an enjoyable romp.