SHIT AND SHINE "Phase Corrected" LP

Somewhere between the literal meaning of psychedelia as the revealing of the mind, and the literal meaning of apocalypse as the tearing away of the veil, this record stands, pulsing, totally blown out. Phase Corrected may be Shit and Shine at its nastiest and most brutal, but it is also––and by virtue of that fact––Shit and Shine at its most transcendent.

Craig Clouse, aka Shit and Shine, has been called a genius and a maverick by the Wire. And the Quietus says he’s “uninterested in the self-imposed restrictions of genre.” From danceable electro-psychedelia to grinding, confrontational noise, Shit and Shine has, since 2004, made a practice of evading genre conventions. And the same goes for Austin-based Clouse’s explorations via USA/Mexico, his project with King Coffey from Butthole Surfers. But there is a common thread here, a sense of consistency that speaks to more than just bucking tradition. In fact, in all this experimentation and genre-bending, Shit and Shine seems to be meditating on and celebrating the very existence of the underground.

The meditation and celebration continues on his latest full-length, Phase Corrected, an LP commissioned by The Garrote. Clouse wields glacial, staggeringly heavy riffs, industrial drums, and electronics that sound as though they’ve been put through a meat grinder.

Or perhaps it all sounds like it’s coming from the basement.

One can practically smell the cheap fog machine and the bodies milling about, maybe writhing. But like the most transcendent moments that can be found in the midst of milling or writhing through sweaty basements, propylene glycol coating the nasal cavities, Phase Corrected stands out as something literally psychedelic, perhaps literally apocalyptic. Phase Corrected is the sound of that moment, in that basement, when everything becomes either just too much or just the perfect amount, the moment when a complete saturation of the senses becomes an absolute falling away of everything else.