Many of you may have missed out on Shining’s 2005 weirdo masterpiece “In The Kingdom Of Kitsch You Will Be A Monster”. This is surely your loss. With the music scene dominated so fiercely in the past few years by mopey, lo-fi strumming and upbeat, hyper-sexualized dance rock, Shining were like a revelation. They tore into the minds of music fans with a Naked City style blend of acid jazz, extreme metal, and post-rock. Put simply: they were incredibly strange.

“Grindstone” is the band’s fourth album, and could easily be considered their strongest effort to date. Simply put, it’s weird as hell. Even stranger than “Kitsch” was, which is truly an accomplishment in and of itself. The opening of the album could easily cause the uninitiated to think that they were dealing with a Locust-esque spaz-core band. A few rapid fire time changes, some atonal synthesizers, and growly vocals certainly bare more than a little resemblance to everyone’s favourite bug-suited trouble makers. However, by the time the tune is in full swing, the whole track is a chaotic mess of noise rock, jazz and metal. With almost no definition between the genres, it’s impossible to tell where their love of Black Sabbath ends, and their interest in Boredoms begins. That isn’t to say that “Grindstone” is truly a mess, though. Shining know exactly what they’re doing, and it shows. The songs are so precise in their off kilter, genre bending mayhem that it would be impossible for everything here to not have been crafted with excrutiating care.

In all reality, I could go on about this record for hours, but that would be silly. So look at it this way?

Do you like early Boredoms? You’ll like Shining then. Do you like John Zorn? Then you’ll definitely dig Shining. Do you like weird shit that doesn’t make a lick of sense at all at first glance? Then you’ll fucking love Shining.

• Amazon.com
• Amazon.co.uk
• Play.com

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 23rd, 2007 at 12:44 pm and is filed under Recommendations, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.