Events

[NOISE] You could call this a heavy metal show, as much as you could call a Swans show heavy metal. Like Swans, Godflesh and Prurient make extreme music that fetishizes the darker aspects of humanity, but their music is often less structured and sometimes more melodic than what you’d typically think of as metal music, and tends to lean toward flowing textures and repetitive rhythms. Godflesh, lead since the late 1980s by guitarist and vocalist Justin Broadrick, are much closer to what one would call metal—with their contorted chugging guitar riffs, double bass drums, and growled vocals—than New York City’s Prurient. Neither would accept the classification anyhow, though Prurient, real name Dominick Fernow, does admit that death metal and grindcore were what sparked his musical imagination as a teenager.

The title of Prurient’s latest album, Frozen Niagara Falls, suggests a great power forced into bondage, and the feeling is clearly translated through the music. The album’s first track is dominated by a high frequency hissing that cuts through what could be entrance music for cable a TV professional wrestling program. There’s no resolution, either—just a sense of frustration that forever boils. Fernow has indicated that his music is not meant to be considered entertainment to begin with—not to imply that these types of shows can’t be a pleasurable experience, though. Some say that pain and pleasure are only differentiated by our perception of the them, anyways—a theory that Fernow would likely subscribe to.

The word prurient is an adjective that means “having or encouraging an excessive interest in sexual matters.” It’s not quite a synonym for perversion, but it’s close. Fernow’s music is obsessive and unrepentant, but not perverse.

Listening to his 2011 album, Bermuda Drain—his most objectively listenable album—is kind of like closing your eyes and listening to the audio of a horror movie. “If I could, I would take a tree branch and ram it inside you—but it’s already been done,” he begins on “Palm Tree Corpse”—the music to which recalls the retro-creepy soundtrack to movies like Planet Terror or classic 1980s horror movies like Prince of Darkness (Fernow has even remixed music by Prince of Darkness director John Carpenter). Much of Prurient’s music is truly disturbing—littered with these types of murder-fantasies, though most of the vocals on his record are unintelligible shrieks and screeches, save for a few spoken word verses here and there. It’s obvious that no one track can define Prurient’s sound—as it shifts, on Bermuda Drain alone, from melodic industrial metal (“A Meal Can Be Made”) to blinding noise (“Watch Silently”) and down to eerie spoken-word-horror-movie-soundtrack (“Bermuda Drain”).

In a relatively short period of time, Prurient, despite his best efforts to sink deeper and deeper into the underground, has become the “Christ Among the Broken Glass” of noise music, and he’ll join Godflesh when their joint tour comes to the Tralf Music Hall on Tuesday, September 22.