The return of UK outfit Shame’s to the greater Boston area has been a long time coming: initially planned for March of 2022, the resurgence in caution around gatherings during the colder months stymied their plans and delayed the gig to the fall. Boston had clearly been clamoring for their return to The Sinclair however, as their previous visit was one of the most vital and unmissable performances of 2018. Led by the magnetic mania of Charlie Steen, the South London group all but literally tore the house down just as they did last time, blending a mix of their best songs from their two extant records with a bundle of cuts from their next, which Steen proudly declares they’ve finished recording. Given that their previous releases both came out in January of their respective years, it’s a good bet that Shame’s third effort will see us through many a snow day in late 2022 or early 2023.
Emerging in 2018 with Songs of Praise, the band was grown from fertile ground in England’s capital, and the record was a stunning debut, bridging the ever-more-popular genre of post-punk with just a dash of pop tunefulness, like on ‘One Rizla’ and ‘Angie’. The former – one of the earliest songs the ban put to tape – has become one of the group’s defining tracks, alongside the more aggressive ‘Concrete’, anchored by a shouty vocal performance from Steen (backed by bassist Josh Finerty here) and a bridge that carries the listener into the final chorus that is the perfect payoff for the litany of frustrations enumerated earlier in the lyrics. That song makes an early appearance in the flow of the night, and like so many Shame compositions, Finerty – when he’s not at the microphone – is running sprints across the stage while still playing his bass, often jumping back to its center when he reaches one end or another and landing in front of drummer Charlie Forbes.
Even before ‘Concrete’ though they’ve debuted two new tracks, in fact beginning the whole night with one called ‘Alibis (One Cool Jazz)’. It plays to the band’s strengths, featuring Steen tilting his head back, vocal cords armed and ready to deliver the song’s pummeling refrain, before it ends abruptly on the line, “I don’t see no point in coming back / if this is where it’s at”. It’s interesting as an impression of the third record, name not yet revealed, as ‘Alibis’ is not quite as mathematically twisty as many of the tracks from their second, Drunk Tank Pink. That era found them pursuing a more austere sound, stripping back some layers of production and exploring polyrhythmic, complex interplay between instruments that echo some of the first work ever to be termed “post-punk”. Shame’s take on this style is best exemplified in pieces like ‘6/1’, which also comes up early in the night.
For the seventh song of the set, things slow down a bit with ‘The Lick’, only to very rapidly escalate. The early track features a bit of crass humor about Steen wandering down to the “gy-no-cologist” (pronounced exactly that way), and spewing out in double time the mantra of “relatable not debatable”. For its final refrain, Steen bends down low and walks out onto the outstretched hands of an audience that is very aware of what’s coming. But even as he’s out there held up against gravity only by arms, the song doesn’t quite reach its apex until he – still very calmly – recites the chorus: “I don’t wanna be heard if you’re the only one listening / bathe me in blood and call it a christening”. But the second time that line comes, Steen falls onto the hands, Finerty jumps up high, and the song blossoms into its noisy, frothing conclusion.
They follow with another preview of what’s to come, ‘Fingers of Steel’, as well as ‘Adderall’, which slows down initially and features harmonized backing vocals of the titular chemical compound but, characteristically of Shame, explodes in its final refrain of “you stole my life from me!” ‘Fingers’ also features a bit of this plus an even more melodic chorus, and lyrically plays on the solitude and lack of agency that often characterizes Shame’s music. ‘Born in Luton’ dramatizes being on the physical outside of a house in the rain, ‘Harsh Degrees’ makes reference to a puppeteer, and the title of Drunk Tank Pink refers to a supposedly calming shade of paint often seen in a carceral, solitary setting – the same wombic color Steen painted his room between album cycles.
If there was a track from Songs of Praise that foreshadowed what would come on Drunk Tank Pink, it was actually the album opener ‘Dust on Trial’, which begins with Steen not shouting, but slipping into a menacing monotone that sounds almost like another person entirely. Dark and gothic, alongside the interlocked riffs off Eddie Green and Sean Coyle-Smith it once again calls back to the origins of this style of music, replete with Shame’s usual intensity but this time accompanied by an air of absolute menace. By the time the song appears in the setlist, Steen is shirtless onstage at The Sinclair, a prospect that for him is really more a matter of “when” than “if”. Less of a surety though is the exact nature of the third Shame album – even after another pair of teases, ‘The Fall of Paul’ and ‘Yankees’, it remains to be seen what the overall tone of the record is; some places suggest a more melodic turn than DTP, but on the other hand, ‘Alibis’ features guitar patterns that still resound with volatility. It’s quite possible then that, as many bands do a few albums in, Shame are looking to make an album that refines the best of what came before.
After ‘Water in the Well’, Steen pauses on the edge of the stage and, approaching the final pair of songs they’ll play, thanks everyone for coming in French: “Merci beaucoup, tout le monde!” he shouts – “One day in Montreal and I can speak all that!” ‘One Rizla’ follows – a “rizla” being European slang for rolling paper that for some has come to be synonymous with the product in the same way “Kleenex” supplanted the word tissue. A dispatch from youth, it seems to find the song’s narrator in the same interpersonal trap that they’re dealing with in ‘Concrete’, or perhaps an earlier variation on a similar theme. Finally comes ‘Snow Day’, the expansive centerpiece of Drunk Tank Pink.
It features an evasive guitar pattern and sees Steen in a surreal landscape falling into dreams. Sleep – and its unattainability – pop up multiple times in the record, and a bootleg recording of a new song called ‘This Side of the Sun’ finds Sheen observing himself: “you tear yourself apart / for your art / and you wonder why you can’t sleep / you can only dream”. Part of the draw of Shame’s music comes from the unrelenting sound that makes it impossible not to want to throw oneself around the room and collide with others doing the same – but Steen is also mapping a world that has, with age, expanded from fairly literal depictions of conflict from without, to include an internal network of conflict within.
Review and photos by Collin Heroux
