Shovels’ eponymous debut record opens in frenetic fashion: shards of guitar, bruising baselines, and a manic flurry of drums. You’re up against the ropes fending off well-aimed taunts of psychotropic noise, trying to gather your senses before the next blow hits. In a world obsessed with normality and conformity, this is a necessary deviation into chaos.
As MB Jacket subsides, Multiple Furrow rises in its stead, and we’re spirited off down an amphetamine-laced path into cognitive confusion, held together by the harshest of rhythmic foundations. Car Yards is a sonic picture of outer-suburban desolation, a bleak industrial-consumer landscape devoid of spiritual meaning.
Grenoble builds carefully, an aural storm brewing in the distance, waiting to break and shower the landscape with Big Black-esque intensity; yet, phenomenally, it never does. Clyde is introspective, almost introverted, a loosely-formed collage of beats and half-formed melodies; is this a portal into a world of higher consciousness, or a moment of respite before the attack resumes? Alternator Debt – shouldn’t that be code for a bill unpaid to the RACV? – is a one-minute loiter on the concrete factory floor, fiddling about, watching, waiting. The monotony of Arm Arm Leg is captivating, and more than a little imposing – it’s Pink Floyd through a post-industrial lens, a metaphor for humanity’s inherent inhumane and dysfunctional behaviour.
By the time Expire signals the end of the album – again, the bleakness is so confronting it lends itself to psychiatric counselling – Shovels have led you through a journey as stark as it is subliminally invigorating. This isn’t a record for the weak-hearted – it’s a record for those who’re prepared to think deep.
BY PATRICK EMERY
Best Track: MB Jacket
If You Like These, You’ll Like This:FEEDTIME, BIG BLACK
In A Word:Dark
