Review Summary: “When I first started up the band in the late eighties the underground didn't have rules.”
“Within 12 minutes of our set the plug was pulled on MEAT SHITS for being so loud, abrasive and offensive. Fortunately we were able to get 90 songs in our set before the club shut us off.”
I like thinking about noisy music. It’s liberating. Particularly the stuff focused on an immediate, visceral experience. This approach avoids getting bogged down in the arbitrary (music theory) or the negligible (the finer points of production ‘quality’). It also tends to throw-off any insipid f
uckwits intending to opine at length about the
meaning behind the lyrics. I hate reading/writing reviews which feel like each paragraph is just a tick of a checkbox - though that’s a bit of a digression. What I really want to convey here is the ‘lens’ by which I look at music like this (and maybe you might wanna try them on sometime too).
“Kevin, we love you. Kevin, we don’t understand this, what’s going on?”
There’s an odd sort of staccato meta-rhythm here, as in their early works the band commonly wrote ‘songs’ that were essentially 5-second blasts. The drum machine is programmed to such a point (in combination with the rough recording) where each little burst seems to coagulate into a blob of noise. And that’s defining sound here - just sloppy violence rigidly punctuated by the gaps between songs (all 781 of them presumably). Add the largely monotone, animalistic grunting and that’s pretty much all you can hear besides the barely-there guitar (just some flickers around the edges). It’s certainly confronting in how minimal and abstract it all sounds. However,
Meet the Shits is also somewhat hypnotic in a way, with little variations within the monstrous pattern. For instance, the garbled, snarling vocals fluctuate, creating odd climaxes that last the course of multiple songs. Some of the song/gap lengths fluctuate too, allowing for a prolonged gasp, snatches of a sample or a brief window for a couple of catchy licks. The way the initially-monolithic and obnoxious sound opens up on repeated listens is genuinely rewarding.
