Digging: Prurient – Bermuda Drain

Prurient: Bermuda Drain
Hydra Head (2011)

According to Bermuda Drain‘s liner notes you should “listen at night while driving through European tunnels”. I was in Japan over the new year and this record is also the perfect soundtrack for speeding around Tokyo’s freeways, winding through neon lit and smog stained skyscrapers like a scene from Bladerunner. Despite the hype leading up to this release things have gone quiet for Prurient. Critics praised Bermuda Drain for the most part, but his fans seem unsure about the goth-wave direction. This shift in sound shouldn’t come as a surprise really, given Dominick Fernow’s involvement in the synthetic emo project Cold Cave, and his increasing interest in keyboards and poetry over his last few records. And on a track like Watch Silently, where the percussive stomp sounds like a Wolf Eyes impersonation, he should be  keeping the noise Nazis satisfied, but it seems the moody synths found throughout the other eight tracks are too foreign for most.

The more I listen to Bermuda Drain the more I appreciate its stark landscapes and knack for manipulating noise and atmosphere into something that almost resembles a song. Rarely has someone been able to make synth lines sound so menacing without melting in cheese. The vibe is foreboding, Fernow’s spoken prose is sparse, clear and threatening. He sounds like a man on edge, and when he erupts into gut wrenching screams, their contrast against the emotive synthesisers is unsettling. Sure, Suicide were doing something similar in the 70s but their schtick was way more inspired by blues and rock. And Alan Vega thought he was Jim Morrison. Suicide didn’t sound menacing (even if their live show was), in fact at times they almost sounded funky.

The easiest and more accurate reference point for Bermuda Drain is Horror and Action movie soundtracks of the 80s, where keyboards and drum machines provided cheap backing tracks to schlock. John Carpenter and Dario Argento are all over this and that’s probably why I can appreciate Bermuda Drain. Despite its angst and claustrophobia there is a sentimental edge to the record; nostalgia about being both repulsed and attracted to the video nasties of yore, watching something forbidden. Rooting for the monster on-screen. I like Bermuda Drain, I like it a lot. And I think the noise nerds need to ease up on Fernow for pushing his own boundaries.