Between 1994 and 1999, Prolapse released four albums. Over the course of their initial seven-year career, beginning in 1992, they won a staunch fan in John Peel, with their sessions seeing a belated release in 2022. Aside from some live dabblings and digital reissues, they’ve been largely dormant, until now.
As titles go, ‘I Wonder When They’re Going To Destroy Your Face’ is nothing if not attention-grabbing or astringent, and in that sense, it’s typical Prolapse, and the same is true of noise it contains.
The first song, ‘The Fall of Cashline’ is a four-chord blast that hammers away at a simple, repetitive riff for nearly six minutes, and they go hell-for-leather for the duration. I’m reminded in some respects of ‘The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall’, opening with the rough, choppy, repetitive ‘Lay of the Land’ (which has almost exactly the same duration, too). ‘The Fall of Cashline’ seems to tumble over itself in a rush to happen, an urgent, chaotic racket that hangs together only because the motorik drumming stays straight as an arrow, no fills, just metronomically holding that square four-four as a sonic tempest rages all around.
‘Cha Cha Cha 2000’ is layered, choppy, and jarring, dual vocals overlapping, angular blasts of treble slicing through the loose groove that humps its way up and down , while the six-and-a-half-minute ‘Err on the Side of Dead’ builds from ramshackle beginnings into a messy mass of treble-riven jangle, and while I’m honestly not seeking out Fall reference points, the similarities to this and ‘Smile’ from Perverted by Language are incontrovertible. It’s by no means a criticism, though. They’ve totally nailed that jagged, ragged jangle, paired with a gritty bass groove and song forms defined by repetition.
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Stretching out towards ambient / post-rock / spoken word dialogue territory, ‘Ghost in the Chair’ marks a shift towards the middle of the album, while ‘On The Quarter Days’ takes a turn towards a more overtly electronic bent, while pushing further into deep, noisey, experimental psychedelia. Arriving at a solid, motorik groove a couple of minutes in, they soon return to the ragged, jagged, raw lo-fi indie form that defined much of the album, with the barrelling, bass, driven ‘Cacophony No. C being exemplary.
It seems hard to conceive that a band more than thirty years into their existence, who many will have likely given up hope of new material from, would make a return not only so strong in vibrant, but also so wild with its instrumentation. There’s a zeal, a passion, an energy that crackles throughout ‘I Wonder When They’re Going To Destroy Your Face’ that sounds like a band thirty years younger – and will totally destroy your face.
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