Apparently taking his cues from the electric chair with an oblique reference to a Catholic funeral service whose riverrun procession might nevertheless flow down the Ganges or the Mekong, the Liffey or most probably the Mississippi, adorning his cover with images of Pennywise the clown and the serial killer John Wayne Gacy who turns out died by lethal injection, a deviant Prurient squats atop the mercy seat as Destroyed Electricity is subsumed by sheathes of noise amid the ripples of a rare melodicism. From the church bells and stratified lyricism of the opening tracks ‘December ’78’ and ‘Dark Flower Bloomed At Night’, ravaged yet ravishing, ‘Return To Necrophilia’ is more wiry and ‘Smoky Bridge Between Men And Boys’ is more aerated than the title makes it sound, with the helical spurts of ‘Books To Stimulate Victims’ implying the alien and intergalactic.
Bookended by a couple of caterwauling screams, on ‘Slay The Handcuff Dragon Inside You’ the current goes into overdrive, sparks flying and wires recoiling as everything erupts through an envelope of pure static. By contrast there is a nocturnal and soothing, guileless sort of lullaby quality to ‘Tollway’ as the stirring of sine tones sounds like clarion bells on an archway to heaven. Then the organ chords of ‘Des Plaines Confidence’ – whose title evokes the Illinois town and the waterway which bridges Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River valley – are steadily overwhelmed by pummelling waves of fuzz and feedback.
Meanwhile BBQ Grave with Agonal Lust is more macabre and apocalyptic, from the old horror movie-esque Frankenstein monster of the title split which is eventually surrounded by helicopters and other craft before a furtive crawl through scrubland and forest. The power electronics of Agonal Lust blared out during the Nuclear War Now/Hospital Fest in Osaka back in early April, the first volume of a music festival dedicated to a boundary-shredding cross section of extreme metal, doom and noise which was organised by Dominick Fernow’s long-running Hospital Productions.
Siren wails and thick distortions characterise Agonal Lust’s own ‘Impulse Disturbance’, with Fernow continuing the furtive, backpedaling, arms raised and face-covering evasions on ‘Relegated To The Shadows’, which ends in a hail of helical blips and an astral ascent. In the reverberations of a great gong, the underlying Gregorian melody of ‘Relegated To The Shadows’ takes hold through the garbled liturgical strains of ‘Positional Asphyxiation’, a second collaborative effort as the extended play proves a modern Prometheus, juddering godlike to a truly warped and weepful climax.
