Prolapse

Backsaturday (Jetset/Big Cat)
by Nik Rainey

Bands like Prolapse represent the last best hope for radio-unfriendly indie rock – emissaries from a misshapen musical sphere untouched by heavy metal crotch rot, pop dyspepsia, or punk parsimony, where iconoclasts are the only icons, and all influences are put through the grinder to come out the other side as something new – a kind of recombinant DIY.

Backsaturday (Jetset/Big Cat), this Brit band’s first stateside effort, is the sound of confusion made twitchy flesh, a radio jammed between two frequencies, what happens when you leave a stack of vintage Krautrock, Nurse With Wound, and Savage Republic platters lying out in the sun until they melt together into one warped, delicious wax circle. These monkeys have range, too – melding the babble-into-one-ear/sing-into-the-other dynamic of Gang of Four’s “Anthrax” into demi-pop on “TCR,” approximating Unknown Pleasures-era Joy Division after a good night’s sleep on “Zen Nun Deb,” climaxing with a fifteen-minute ode to controlled chaos (“Flex”), followed by a descent into utter calm with the near-subliminal closer “Strain Contortion of Bag.” Tensely tasty stuff – much like the repetition-is-god ethic of ’80s Fall (a key influence) – the rhythm sets a metronomic stasis groove in motion while crazy Scot Mick Derrick rants in an impenetrable brogue and vocal foil Linda Steelyard sweetly plays the Brix to his Highlands Mark E. Smith. The result is divine excrescence well worth stomping around in.