Shaky Shrines are a band from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania occupying a niche at the intersection of post-punk, psychedelica and garage rock. Today sees the release of a new record Shaky At Best, complete with artwork by Jeremy Beightol (which is in fact a 29″x29″ painting). Here’s what the band’s lead Braden had to say about the new album:
“This past year was pretty nightmarish for me – a grandmother whom I was very close to passed away after quick mental decay and hallucinatory visions, a dear friend attempted suicide by pill overdose, I left a long term relationship, and our original guitar player quit to form a new band. My whole world flipped in a matter of months and all of the songs I began to write were dark, brooding, wallowing meditations in sadness – and quite frankly, I didn’t like it. So I hired a new guitar player (who became our producer/engineer, too – Dave Cerminara) and asked the band to help me write a record where I could be honest and scared and confused, but that remained upbeat with bright, happy melodies. I didn’t want to sing sad songs with sad music because depression sucks.”
This is a perfect summation of the record, fast-paced, energetic and strangely celebratory in terms of sound, yet lyrically honest and quite often dark to the point of bleak. From the laid back psychedelica of ‘Close Call (Adderall Anxiety)’ and ‘Sneakin’ Out’, to the heavy riffs of ‘Liar’ and ‘Yr House Isn’t Haunted’, the songs are shot through with a detached sense of doom, an understanding of personal weakness that obliterates any chance of sentimental hope or self-absorbed melodrama. The feeling is captured perfectly on the punky ‘Tomato Tomato’:
“Id rather suffer than recover from my daily addictions
because at least I know exactly what it is I am getting
its nice to feel like I am in control in control of something”
But that does not mean personality and humour are absent, far from it. ‘It Was Mine (the Whole Time)’ is a cheeky tale of teenage audacity (although is kind of sad if you think about it too much), ‘Sun Spits’ utilises some impressively weird descriptives (“the car crawls like a saturated centipede”) and the blackly triumphant sing-a-long refrain of ‘Thru The Night’ is hard not to love. All together now… “I made it through the night! I made it through the night!”
To put it simply, Shaky At Best is an album about people addicted to trouble, folks gripped by a love-hate relationship with chemicals and loud noises, stuck within the paradox of crippling anxiety coupled with a good-time death wish. It’s about living too hard as a way to escape thinking too hard. Sometimes ideals and bleeding hearts can’t save us, and it’s up to people like Shaky Shrines to make us feel less alone.
You can stream Shaky At Best in it’s entirety below, and buy it from Bandcamp right now.
If you like what you hear, be sure to check out Shaky Shrines’ previous releases, including a 7″ out on Velocity of Sound.
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