A staggering 36 years into their mission to explore strange new sounds, to boldly embed themselves inside rewardingly thorny knots of riff, Brighton-based mavericks I’m Being Good’s fascination for the delectable complexities within subterranean noise thrives unabated. Their ninth full-length is the sound of insatiable curiosity on the prowl, an exercise in just how many dangerous twists and occasional jump-scares this kind of post-math, post-prog, post-post-rock music can encompass. Spaceshitter’s not simply out to unnerve you – that would be ungentlemanly, and the group have plenty more ideas in their quiver. But this is definitely a record that savours every curveball it sends out there.
Like forebears Polvo and contemporaries Part Chimp, I’m Being Good’s world is one where curious riffs seemingly leading nowhere will suddenly explode into violence, but Shapeshitter’s more menacing moments are also its most restrained. Opener ‘Parasol’, for example, plucks spindly lines strung across a sinewy, skeletal rhythm-section negotiating challenging terrain, Andrew Clare sounding like a maudlin Damon Albarn as he ruminates about something at a volume drowned out by the tolling guitar chime. An electrifying tension pervades: is a sudden explosion of noise waiting just around the corner? I won’t spoiler it for you, though if this kind of anxiety is your bag, then boy do I’m Being Good got the Sado for your Masochism.
The ethos of Spaceshitter – awful name, excellent LP – is very much that uncertainty is an energy, that keeping the listener on the wrong foot is absolutely the thing. ‘Appropriately Infinite Universe’ is, for much of its beastly crawl, that sinister sound coming from the cupboard that you keep telling yourself must be the invention of your paranoid brain. Of course, you must be imagining that scritch-scratch of tiny claws on wood – there couldn’t really be rats (or worse) hiding in there, right? And then Clare and Stuart O’Hare’s guitars clang in with a brilliantly brutish, distended riff that confirms you weren’t imagining it, and yes your closet is heaving with malevolent beasties, and yes it’s time to call Rentokill, or maybe even the Ghostbusters. ‘A Greener Shade Of Teal’ is a low-key torture device gearing up for use, all slow-drip menace, while ‘Overton Window’, appropriately, forever lurches left and right, like the group were pursuing its wiry, elusive theme across the bow of a ship tossed by angry waves. Perhaps this is what the band played as the Titanic sank.
It’s not all slo-mo murder music: ‘Splainers Gonna Splain’ sounds like someone undid the stitching holding together some ancient country mope, its mournfulness and twanging guitars spilling out shapelessly and pleasingly. ‘Marsupialised’ is bruised and uncertain folk-pop, Robert Wyatt with a really horrible hangover, and all the more impressive for it. Meanwhile, ‘Have I Got Noose For You’ and ‘Tiny Cancer’ – sexy midnight punners both – deliver the kind of wrought-iron post-rock Shellac used to deal in. But it’s the magnificent ‘Red Boy’ that is Spaceshitter’s uneasy peak, pushing the darkness into the red. Its terrifying, apocalyptic symphony is all military drums, ear-splitting gongs, violins like knives through shower curtains, and suggests that if I’m Being Good ever tire of the casual sex, snowstorms of drugs and briefcases full of unmarked cash that characterise their scene, they could easily career-change to the world of movie soundtracks. You sense Bernard Hermann would approve.
