The first track of this second SHIELD YOUR EYES album opens with a riff like the opening blast of "Nicola Vella Burrows" at the start of the band's first album. It's disorienting move number one on a 13 track adventure into risk-taking and endangered blues guitar music that travels to strange places with single minded intuition.
Having had the album recommended to me by Andy Abbott of THAT FUCKNG TANK, I find myself in debt to his good judgement and heartily recommend it to anyone who appreciates the sorts of things that Abbot gets up to in his spare time.
In SHIELD YOUR EYES, Steff Ketteringham is the needle-sharp focal point of a semi-improvisational punkish trio. His voice has streaks of desperation and impassioned soul. It mostly squeals, but it can croon. The emotional gamut spreads from lust, across to fury and out the other side to lost romance.
His guitar playing is a spooling tirade of exploratory phrases - as if a madman were chasing a riff that Jimmy Page couldn’t play and whose indiscipline Robert Fripp would despair of. Henri Grimes (drums) and Toby Hayes (bass) construct a precise and ferocious redoubt from which Ketteringham can blast out curlicue missiles that spin off like scrolls in demented pirate drawings by Mervyn Peake. Our attention is repeatedly hauled off to wider and wilder territory.
The tempo and attack are mostly merciless, juddered and thumped by along by Grimes and Hayes. In the magnificent "Torn Apart On Details" a startling change of direction slams on the brakes, cranks up the emotion and goes off somewhere a bit Peter Green. Only a bit, though. The vocal track is gently tortured and the guitar still does some pitch defying things with the sweet blues phrasing. "Mort Aux Ours" is the other misfit among misfits - a delicious confessional that bemoans the femme most fickle in under two minutes. And maybe "Sandy" that follows has the same target in its nine minutes of frenzied despair. Maybe. But it is back in the raging mood that holds sway for the bulk of the album.
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"Shield 'Em" was recorded last year in a three day session of virtuoso first or second take rehearsal-cum-writing that stands up as a completely valid and very satisfactory album. I hear no points at which I would have wished for a more polished or resolved feel. Even where they might (in their own terms) have been uncertain or pausing, the sound is impressively articulate and the feel is like a bravura live gig.
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author: Sam Saunders
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