The Shits have been a band for a little under nine years and Diet Of Worms is their third album. Neither of which is especially eye-catching as statistics go, but noteworthy in the context of the Leeds DIY punk scene in which they originate, where bands (including ones featuring members of The Shits) frequently rise and fall leaving hardly any documented evidence they were there. A lot of the groups who historically pre-empted the sound heard on Diet Of Worms – noise rock, pigfuck, scum rock, sludge punk or some other microgenre terminology – didn’t stick around for anything like this long either, implosive tendencies being a common issue.
So while The Shits’ notoriety has been boosted by the rowdy aura around them, in particular their live performances, they clearly also have enough organisational competence to function as a band. Similarly, although the eight songs on this album are uniformly grotty, assaultive and tonally harsh by almost any musical yardstick, there are also lots of elements which betray skill and consideration. A six-piece featuring three guitarists, in some respects they pick up where 2023 album You’re A Mess (which debuted this format) left off. ‘In A Hell’, which opens Diet Of Worms, sports a bassline as monolithic as could be asked for – but an unusually melodic guitar part too, peeking cheekily through myriad layers of redlined dirge and (perhaps inadvertently) taking The Shits closer to a shoegaze aesthetic than would have previously seemed likely.
Elsewhere, an increased deployment of wah and flange effects put us in the vicinity of psychedelia, although a lot of what gets called that is at the diametric opposite to what The Shits are putting into the world. The bands I hear as this record’s spiritual ancestors – The Stooges on ‘Thank You For Being A Friend’; Loop on the solo towards the end of ‘Then You’re Dead’ – had an ulterior motive of sabotaging psych while copping some of its moves. There’s also ‘Tarrare’, which I think is The Shits’ first song about matters of historical record: specifically an 18th-century Frenchman renowned for his extreme polyphagia (“after being suspected of eating a one-year-old toddler, he was ejected from the hospital,” says Tarrare’s admirably non-judgemental Wikipedia entry). The band’s taste for bad-taste Swedish noise rock institution the Brainbombs isn’t exactly a secret, but generally they’ve been more of a stimulus than something to precisely replicate, as ‘Tarrare’ does.
The Shits’ lyrics tend to complement the music they’re paired with fairly neatly, in that they’re grotesque, lurid and hairy-palmed, but this manifests in a slightly different manner on ‘Change My Ways’, which is this enthusiast’s highlight of Diet Of Worms if not their whole catalogue to date. It’s the band’s version of blues-rock, swampy and unpleasant but with the essential tenets of the form in place, and singer Callum Howe shifts his perspective to suit: drinking alone and descending into a shame spiral caused by drinking alone, like a graveyard’s worth of Delta bluesmen before him.
While Howe doesn’t embody this to the point of attempting a blues vocal, it’s striking to compare his voice on Diet Of Worms with Punishment, The Shits’ debut album from 2020 – the difference between a howl and a growl, in short, with what you might assume was a hardcore and metal influence mostly sloughed off. On ‘Joyless Satisfaction’ I hear a little Mark E Smith and a little more John Lydon in the leaden consonants and dragged-out vowels, and on LP closer ‘Three O’Clock In The Morning’ his Yorkshire accent comes through extra clear. It makes him resemble a retired miner suffering from night terrors, which turns out to be an appropriate and effective top layer on a very good album with more depth than it lets on.
