Prurient

***A vinyl issue of PRURIENT's Unknown Rains, originally released as a limited edition cassette in 2016. Utterly destructive and heart-wrenching power noise and catharsis from the don gorgon of Hospital Productions, making his first album confession since the release of the stunning Frozen Niagara Falls (2015). Taking almost 40 minutes to spell-out a litany of ills that mark up as classic, pain-saturated Prurient in contrast with the more layered, nuanced narrative and more complex production values of his last album, the set boots-off with the infernal backdraft and flagellating vox of the album's most succinct piece, "Let Your Mind Free (Whip The Corpse)". Sharp blasts of noise distortion conceal a forlorn Fernow vocal, like that classic Lynchian conceit of obscuring dialogue at the most crucial moment, perversely enhancing narrative through obstruction. It's a brilliant, disturbing, opener. Sore chord progressions and those same distanced vox crushed by needling distortion fill the nine minutes of "Before Rain Becomes Snow" with much emotional impact; revealing a sort of disturbed and buried shoegaze appeal that sounds like a Grouper x Prurient recording session from another dimension. However, the album's most captivating track comes with the gaping black-holer, "In The Ruins Of My Brother"—where the distortion dissipates to the edges, allowing vast blooming bass flares and slithering high registers to wrap around the neck with a spacious, full-spectrum dominance that recalls Prurient's Pleasure Ground classic, before "Red Poppy Laughter" slips back into an opiated sort of naval-gazing noise bliss.