Shame
Drunk Tank Pink

We were kids, some more than others, and there was Punk labeled "for fun" clashing against the intransigence of environments that we could summarize as 924 Gilman Street in Berkeley. Jello Biafra whipped, Green Day bounced back and celebrated the act of bouncing in their best song.
It was the last futile effort to protect the status of subculture against normalization as a genre among genres, then fatefully descended.

The post-punk of the 2010s comes without cultural premises, not from social stimuli, nor bearing any trace of conflict.
When you try to draw a line between your symbols and those of the chavs, the clerks, and the smart workers, it ends up resembling them with tattoos. It is a cultured, aesthetic, philological operation; a performative act that exhausts itself in the live show and culminates in the pilgrimage of a wealthy audience to Barcelona in June. Nothing new, just a value judgment that serves as context.

The Londoners Shame, two years after the celebratory and celebrated Songs Of Praise, adhere to the paradigm in such a perfect, lucid, and cold way in swallowing and regurgitating the same vomit spasm, that they leave no room for any criteria other than quantitative. The gradient of emotion and execution is identified, proceeding with + and - of intensity.
Lyrically irrelevant, metrically James Murphy in rhyme (crystalline in the metropolitan frenzy à la Talking Heads of Born In Luton, which bursts into a Preoccupations-like chorus), they find their content peak in the Daft Punk-style robosentimentality of Human, for a Minute. Nigel Hitter is a theft from Parquet Courts, not coincidentally the most interesting bass line. Snow Day is the ++ intense in execution, in its chorus break: it's also a piece by the no less pedantic Bambara. 6/1 owes its existence to the hi-hat, while it seems to mimic the early Protomartyr.
What else to say.

It is the drama of losing a mundane dimension that ultimately unveils these records in their fragility, qualitative arbitrariness; their being and perhaps not trying to be anything more than for fun. I cannot, for the season, make it a fault. January 2021, Drunk Tank Pink, unfortunate conjunction.