I hate calling X of the year on anything until at the very least the last week of December, but this album is going to be almost impossible to top.
I would honestly have been up for the whole album continuing with the opening 2 tracks’ ludicrously overdriven total noisefest. Ho-Ho! (No More) and Brown Morning don’t hold back and I love them, but things quickly start to sound like a Butthole Surfers album trying to break the world record of distortion pedals used in 40 minutes.
Almost every song on I Cocked My Gun… sounds like a trashing of some other band, but in a horrendously enjoyable fashion. Pleasant Guff is a phenomenal Grungey jam, with Teenage Survival passable as an early demo of Nirvana’s Tourettes, X-Ray Phantom sounds like it could have been a huge Indie anthem, if it wasn’t for the intentionally bad vocals (which make me think of Picnic of Love every time), then Endless Void is what a Tool interlude would probably be like if they stopped obsessing over some stupid numbers.
Hashish (The Yelling Song) is my personal highlight of the album though. 7 minutes of pure filth and frenzy, broken up with moments of dreamy Shoegaze or a sprinkling of Doom for a highly effective contrast.
ShitNoise is pretty much the perfect name; music creatively deteriorated with noise and shit qualities, but the approach and execution is so perfectly balanced that the result is an album as offensive to listen to as it is charming. Opening the floodgates with pure noise, then serving a flurry of strong individual tracks that showcase how well these musicians know how to play incredible, well written music. To then work in the harsh noise and painfully off-key vocals so consistently well is a marvel.
If I were to rank each song individually out of 10, the lowest score would be an 8, but as someone who only tends to tell you how an album sounds terribly but a good kind of terrible and that you should by it, I’ll be nice and bury a personal 10/10 rating for it mid-paragraph. I Cocked My Gun… will at times pain you to crank up the volume, but it would be a crime not to. And crimes are bad! Don’t be a crime person.
But yeah, I’m calling album of the year on this one. Congratulations, ShitNoise!
Jake Hancke – 10/08/2024
I Cocked My Gun and Shot My Best Friend is available to pre-order now, with a limited Cassette released on 11th September 2024 via Cruel Nature Records
You can find more on ShitNoise via their Website, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, BandCamp (with an extremely limited run of CDs available!) and other places here
The Cauteriser 