I get music recommendations from all over the place. As time goes on, the number and variety of places has only grown which you could think of as a dream come true. I do.
I follow Rough Trade , “Independent purveyors of great music, since 1976”, on Instagram for obvious reasons—their posts are about music. One recent entry listed a bunch of records from 2018, the selections consisting of albums they still found themselves listening to and loving (my words). One of them was Songs of Praise by shame, which was new to me.
Songs of Praise is the London-based band’s debut on Dead Oceans from 2018 and the good people at Rough Trade compared shame’s sound to IDLES, their Joy as an Act of Resistance remains one of the records from 2018 that I still listen to and love, so I naturally typed “shame” into Roon’s search field and was listening to Songs of Praise within second (another dream come true).
Seconds after that, yea not even a full minute in, I added Songs of Praise to my library where it has be on contantplay. shame is comprised of vocalist Charlie Steen, guitarists Sean Coyle-Smith and Eddie Green, bassist Josh Finerty, and drummer Charlie Forbes. Together they make high-energy crisp and prickly rage-fueled music. The band cites Eddy Current Suppression Ring and The Fall as musical influences:
Utilising both the grit and sincerity of that musical background, shame carved out a niche in the South London music scene and then barrelled fearlessly into the angular, thrashing post-punk that would go on to make up Songs of Praise, their Dead Oceans debut.
Grit and sincerity. I love that. It would make for a nice genre. If you like any of other band’s mentioned so far, and/or if you enjoyed last week’s pick by Fontaines DC, odds are you also will enjoy shame. It’s also a safe bet to assume we’ll all still be listening to and loving Songs of Praise this time next year.
Listen here, buy there:
