Shopping: Why Choose

Whenever Shopping are asked whether they’re a political band, they always default to talking about dancing. Any messages in their music are purely a matter of circumstance, they say: of being delivered by a queer woman of color, of being a London DIY band who know what productivity looks like on their own terms. It's not hard to see why they'd want to avoid the political umbrella: when a British band cops to having political motivations, their inability to overhaul the system/write "Ghost Town" Part Two is usually held up as a sign of their failure—in the U.K., at any rate. And so rather than subject themselves to that scrutiny, Shopping instead choose to shake off their oppressors, encouraging shimmying to fill the emptiness of the superficial social interactions and masquerade of commerce-as-choice that their songs quite clearly detail.

There’s no shortage of academic texts citing the radical nature of movement, but the trio’s second album, Why Choose, is blissfully direct and free of added intellectual ballast. When so much modern discourse is a teetering layer cake of opinions, it’s bliss to hear Rachel Aggs celebrate idleness in one breath—over the awkward twangs of "Time Wasted"—and then demand urgency on "Why Wait"’s anxious, accelerated disco hi-hats. As she puts it in the latter, "Why choose when I just want it both ways?/ When I could just take it all?/ I wanna do it my way."

To that end, very few of Shopping’s post-punk moves are novel, but the trio maintain an exhilarating, crafty pace, having upped the detail and twisted the structures of their songs since 2013’s Consumer Complaints. The almost uniformly plain guitar tone used throughout is a great showcase for their bright and endlessly varied post-punk tangles. Their nimble songs barely touch the ground, other than the occasional coldwave synth breeze, or seawashed motorik splash à la Electrelane, touches that make for lovely, errant starbursts in Shopping’s otherwise tightly martialed constellations.

A sense of street-smarts survival runs through Why Choose: The rattling guitar of "Wind Up" and "Knocking" is scrappy as a young bare-knuckle boxer. "Take It Outside" runs on caustic pep, mocking the language of empty threat with drummer Andrew Milk delivering weary pleas to "break it up." By contrast, the record’s sincere, personal moments don’t posture. On the brisk "I Have Decided", Agga adopts a deep, unyielding tone to declare, "You won’t change my thinking/ This means nothing to me."

Shopping are in constant conversation, literally so when Aggs and Milk act out halves of two different lovers’ quarrels on "Straight Lines", the second half of a dialogue they started on Consumer Complaints. On that record’s "For Your Money", Milk played the role of a young man hooking up with rich older guys; here he plays the moneyed party, allowing the band to turn the uncertain power dynamic of user and used inside-out again. He reels off his character’s anxieties at the arrangement, concluding: "You go home empty-handed when you go home with his type," but there's no implied judgement of the situation. Shopping’s idea of choice doesn't mean one agenda at the expense of another, but establishing a welcoming space for all comers. It works because their naturally scatty, riotous spark means they could never sound neutral.