South London five-piece Shame have had one of the most notable three-album runs in recent memory. They slammed onto the scene in 2018 with Songs of Praise, then followed up with the rush of Drunk Tank Pink in 2021, and thus the band deservedly rose head and shoulders above the pack in the UK’s fertile “post-punk” roster. And after months of coy teasing on Twitter, which led to single releases and finally an album announcement, the band has begun to cut across North America once again in a riotous rampage of the continent, leaving rooms of sweaty, smiling fans in their wake. Their last tour brought them here – to this room at The Sinclair in Cambridge, MA – roughly half a year ago, when they previewed select tracks from their third record, Food for Worms, alongside DTP tracks that had yet to see the light of day in the States, and with this show they flesh out their new album even further.
In 2022, it was hard to pin down what exactly the then-unnamed Food for Worms was going to be tonally; some songs bristled with the incessant energy listeners have come to expect from the band, but new tracks like ‘Adderall’ – recently subtitled “End of the Line”, ostensibly to avoid legal trouble – played a bit differently, slowing down and building up rather than being as in-your-face as the band can often be. Drunk Tank Pink was often tightly-wound and technical in its sonics, and lyrically found vocalist Charlie Steen looking inward at a time when that seemed like all there was to do in the world. Food for Worms is more varied, easily the most wide-ranging Shame record; in totality it feels more akin to Songs of Praise, albeit with the benefit of years spent traveling, writing, changing, and maturing; all serving to improve upon the qualities that set the band apart in the first place.
The band’s set begins as the new record does, with ‘Fingers of Steel’, huge chords ringing out with back-and-forth vocals that culminate in a best-ever chorus, then dives into ‘Alibis’ – which actually lost its subtitle before release, in an odd bit of coincidence. These two tracks, as well as the soon-to-follow ‘Six Pack’, frame the themes in Steen’s lyrics across the record: feeling on the outside, ostracized; or alternatively, deliberately putting oneself there in the pursuit of escapism. ‘Six Pack’ imagines a fantastical pocket universe that fulfills its sole occupant’s every fantasy – a bargain so attractive he loses himself within its delusion completely – all surrounded by a squelched, funk-influenced guitar pattern formed by Eddie Green and Sean Coyle-Smith.
From the very first note, Steen is at the edge of the stage, working the crowd. He’s shaking outstretched hands, crouching on the monitors mid-song, and within minutes the middle of the room is a tempest of people crashing into each other gleefully. New England crowds often exhibit an inexplicable reticence to mosh even when it would be called for; but there’s no such hesitation for Shame, nor has there ever been. By the fourth song, the band’s early hit ‘Concrete’, the crowd is properly conditioned for what comes next: during an instrumental passage, Steen waves his public in towards him, beckoning even as he backs up right against drummer Charlie Forbes’ kit; in the next instant he’s running to the dozens of raised hands, carried out to the center of the room on just the fourth song. This is Steen in his natural state, effortlessly charismatic, a smile of good-natured chaos, fully fueled by the energy in the room. The night prior, he made news jumping from the side of the mezzanine at Irving Plaza in NY – sadly (or perhaps not, for the club’s lawyers) The Sinclair’s upper balcony remains decidedly out of reach. But Steen is undeterred by the lack of verticality, and by the end of ‘Six Pack’ is shirtless, as he was inevitably destined to be. He’s hardly the only one with surplus energy, though: bassist Josh Finerty strafes from side to side onstage, as often as not leaping into the air at one end or the other as if it were as natural and essential to his playing as moving his fingers along the frets.
After directing the crowd out of the center of the room and signaling them to collapse together at the start of ‘Tasteless’, the pace abates just a smidgen for ‘Burning by Design’, which contains a lyrical connection to ‘Adderall’. They’re seemingly complementary perspectives on the same situation, one narrating from the inside of the apathy-inducing escape, the other calling from outside to no avail. The substance seems to have eroded the foundation of a relationship, and that type of estrangement preoccupies many of the album’s other songs, like ‘Yankees’, where Steen’s narrator declares, “I’ll just take my dose and I’ll smile for a while” as the very idea of love becomes corrupted around him.
But within the album’s emotional landscape, it’s ‘Orchid’ that is most compelling from Food for Worms’ selections on relationships, both in lyrics as well as instrumentation, which sees Coyle-Smith pick up an acoustic guitar. This is a possible first for the band’s catalog, and if not it’s certainly the most prominently the instrument has ever been featured. Steen makes quite a departure, too: he has, at times, revealed a lower register to his voice that comes out so rarely and differently to his normal timbre that it’s stunning – he did this first in the opening of ‘Dust on Trial’. But ‘Orchid’ sustains it for the duration of the song, recalling the sort of regal, Gothic delivery of Michael Gira in White Light-era Swans. But even though it sounds totally, thrillingly different, the longing is the same: a hope for a return that may never come.
Steen once again sits down on the monitor wedges here, and to the patient tempo of the song casts his free arm high above the heads and hands of the crowd, moving in increments and by degrees, as if unveiling an invisible shroud above them. And for their part, the crowd seems just as keen on Shame’s slower songs as the fast and loud ones, but this follows – from the outset, the designation of “post-punk” has never been a barrier to the band’s genre-crossing predilections. As if to demonstrate this, the band moves from ‘Orchid’ through ‘Water in the Well’ and into ‘One Rizla’, from balladry to angular patterns to one of their catchiest rock tunes ever, spanning three albums over as many songs, and at the end of that run Steen hoists his microphone stand above his head triumphantly.
After ‘Snow Day’, the conceptual heart of Drunk Tank Pink, there’s but one song left for the evening. Steen summons the hands of the crowd once again, but rather than diving to them he simply steps out, standing straight up for most of closer ‘Gold Hole’. At the song’s apex he leans forward and pivots onto his back, then gets buoyed about the room a bit before finally settling back towards the stage. Tuesday night be damned, as ever Shame’s live performance is genuinely unmissable and invigorating. Even as they’ve diversified their sound, the rocket engine intensity that propelled them out of Brixton has never wavered, and – no matter in what register – it’s still felt in every note and syllable.
Review and photos by Collin Heroux
