Shame played Brighton Music Hall – 1/19

U.K. post-punks Shame visited Allston on MLK day with support from Montreal’s Ribbon Skirt.

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It feels almost unbearably cliché to praise a rock band as having “attitude,” lest I immediately age 25 years and start prattling on about a group that’s bringing real music back or proving rock’s not dead, but it’s a quality that feels inextricable from London five-piece Shame. One glimpse at frontman Charlie Steen up there brandishing a mic stand like he’s conducting a symphony, shirtless in suspenders and sunglasses, or bassist Josh Finerty bouncing off the walls like he can’t bear the thought of standing still, and it’s evident that Shame are as much about the presentation as the songs. Their whole deal works as well as it does because both are pretty great.

Last September’s Cutthroat, the band’s fourth full-length, found them shaking up their confrontational post-punk palette with the help of famed producer John Congleton and a dash of Britpop sheen here and there, but on stage those tunes kicked with the same force as the myriad of back catalog favorites they also had up their sleeve. With an atmosphere rendered all the more chaotic by an erratic, rainbow-hued light treatment, Steen and company laid it all out in working up a sizable holiday crowd towards forgetting about the chilly, creeping-dread, Monday-in-January of it all. A particularly boom-y mix at Brighton wasn’t doing the band any sonic favors, but to the credit of that whole attitude thing, it hardly sunk the night.

Openers Ribbon Skirt, hailing from up north, made similar use of stage presence to elevate their craft. I’ve watched many a dreamy art-rock band stand utterly statuesque, so one that performed with propulsion and feeling stood as a refreshing surprise.

Check out a gallery from both bands below.