Let’s face facts here; we’re all a mess. Life in the 2020s thus far has been a litany of crushing indignities at best. Living standards plummet, lies carry the same currency as truth, and rock music - that racket that once served as countercultural force and revolutionary fire - has been neutered and subsumed into nullity. That’s unless you’re listening to The Shits. ‘You’re A Mess’ - the second album from Leeds’ filthiest sons - is a staggering assault of invective fit to reignite your ire, and a sound that constitutes a real and present threat to life and limb. Contained within these eight feral exorcisms is a merciless assault of Stoogian/stygian riffage, gloriously purgatorial abjection and intimidating aggro that takes a garage-rock blueprint and grinds its face in the dirt. If these grimy dirges and salvos of horror have a precedent, it’s in the menacing audial lineage that connects Fun House through the AmRep label, Brainbombs and Drunk In Hell - the process where relentless negativity is alchemically transformed into profane primal salvation. Yet The Shits worship no heroes, obeying a thanatotic urge that sees no separation between death and glory. Listen to this album and you will believe once again in catharsis by way of heavy amplification. Psych-rock is dead, and The Shits are the executioners. Assume the position. ...don't take our word for it, this what The Quietus’s John Doran says this about the album: “Terrible, terrible bastards The Shits are here with all the spiritually uplifting, life affirming, serotonin boosting properties of a dark amber, ammonia stinking, three-day rave piss, in the form of new transmission, You’re A Mess. Starting with a bludgeoning, left of centre, Amphetamine Reptile punk take on The Stooges that laughs in the face of more recent flat white-sipping, pantywaisted post rock and post hardcore innovations and instead concentrates on a caustic, clangorous, bone-cracking assault on all that is right and proper. But steady your nerve, delve into their metallic, acid stripped, pig-fuck grooves and you will find a chaotic world of inverted psychedelia and jet black – fucking appalling – enlightenment waiting for you.” John Doran
