Tracklist:

Act Of – I am Fungus
Static Animal – See You Around
Skirts – Brite Boy (Alex G cover)
Space Mountain – Cloud
Alexander – Going To Sleep
German Error Message – Murmuring
Thelma – Take Me To Orlando
Jeffrey Silverstein – Make Yr Peace (And Have It Too)
camp counselor – museum of broken relationships
Spartan Jet-Plex – Stop
Lala Lala & Why? – Siren 042
Shrimpwitch – Leerers
Sir Babygirl – Flirting With Her
Spielbergs – Five On It
Stella Donnelly – Lunch
Mentalease – Avert a Gaze
Priests – The Seduction of Kansas
Mike Pace and The Child Actors – Hazy, Hot & Humid
Swim Camp – Circle K
BURLY – Kent Lame
Miserable chillers – Cider Palace
Imp of Perverse – Tripping Thru a Hallway On Fire
Go Fever – Olivia
Polyan – Dan Song
Morning River Band – Bury Me
Nigel Wright – Overcast
Denmark – I Know
Sister Wanzala – I Went Whaling in My Gap Year
Body Meat – Nairobi Flex
Derek Piotr – Repeating Bloom (Simon Whetham Remix)
Michael Chinworth – Good As It Gets
Mesa Luna – Dispel
yot club – jaded

The post January 2019 Roundup Mix appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Opener ‘Trouble’ drops you headfirst into the Shrimpwitch rockpool of crustacean jams. Scrappy garage pop, shadowy post-punk and swaying surf pop all come together to create something novel, helped by the fact that Georgi and Kim are natural performers, nowhere more at home than wailing their weird pop songs on stage.

Perhaps unusually for a genre that’s often all about a simple good time, Shrimpwitch also give their lyrics importance. Take ‘Leerers’, for example, which as the title suggests is about the unwanted attention the band can receive from certain (male) parts of their audience. It’s a song “about trying to say no to creeps and leerers when you feel backed up against the wall,” Georgi explains. “It is specifically inspired from two experiences I’ve had while performing in Shrimpwitch. So it’s self-referential, in that when I’m performing live, I’m literally screaming at people that ‘I’m not here for you to leer.’” The result is not just thrillingly direct and raw, but also completes a neat shimmy that takes the power away from oppressive gazes and back where it belongs, with Georgi and Kim, with Shrimpwitch.

‘Green Potatoes’ is another one where the lyrics stand out, a track that the band discuss in an auto-interview over at Pilerats. As with most things the band say, it’s hard to know just how serious they’re being when they describe the song as “basically a comment on the food wastage from capitalist, ruthless, major supermarket corporations who are replacing Gen Z’s first job opportunity with machines and completely and utterly—single-handedly—destroying our economy!”, but either way, hear, hear!

There’s an easy rhythm on ‘Bung Eyed Baby’, a song which shows that Shrimpwitch can do pop as well as punk, while ‘Repetition’ kicks and flails it’s way into tight little curls of a post punk chorus. ‘Digestion’ is full of rollicking swampy guitars and shrill vocals, delivering lines like
“skillfully able to repress / the horror I had to address / the power I possessed to finally find my happiness” with a sardonic fervour.

The full-throttle yelpy punk of ‘Mystique’ is followed by finale ‘Shrimping’, which feels like one last detoxifying purge, a shore-side exorcism that leaves the band twitching and frothing as the last of the shrimp-spirit energy leaves their bodies. It’s a fittingly crazed and energetic end to an album the likes of which you won’t hear again this year.

Gave Me the Itch is out now, and you can get it on cassette via Psychic Hysteria and the Shrimpwitch Bandcamp page.

The post Shrimpwitch – Gave Me the Itch appeared first on Various Small Flames.