Shit and Shine is an experimental music project based in Austin, Texas. Formed in 2004 by bandleader Craig Clouse, its percussion-driven sound mixes noise with electronics.[1] Clouse is the only consistent member, with an ever-rotating line-up of musicians.[2]
The project was picked up by the Riot Season label, who issued their debut You're Lucky to Have Friends Like Us in 2004. The band's second album, titled Ladybird, was released in 2005 and contained a lengthy forty-two minute improvisation built on a repetitive drum rhythm, which critics compared to Velvet Underground's 1967 composition "Sister Ray".[3] The album Jealous of Shit and Shine followed in 2006 and continued to explore terrifying soundscapes. In 2011, it was placed at number eighty-eight on NME's The 100 Greatest Albums You've Never Heard list.[4]
2008's Cherry was the band's first full-length album in two years. Jason Crock of Pitchfork noted that the "abrupt jump-cut edits don't always serve the individual track, but they give the record as a whole its own energy and peculiar logic" and that "the execution isn't perfect on every track, certainly, but Cherry is a great example of a record becoming more than the sum of its parts."[5]
