It's an attractive package on the most base level. The liner notes claim, "Desire is the root of all suffering," and the artwork depicts a woman, possibly a prostitute, in some form of bondage. Paired with the rather bleak photographs of nondescript locales, the entire album screams before it ever begins playing. This stuff is vile: the album is dirty, absolutely filthy, and exciting.Dominick Fernow is a formidable presence live. Typically shirtless, he requires only two microphones and some large amplifiers to extract the shriek and roar of victims who've succumbed to some violent act. His noise is visceral and muscular, masculine in a savage and homicidal sense, and the result live usually involves injury and complete absorption; there's absolutely no way anyone's attention could be anywhere but on him. On record he's fucking loud, the kind of loud that will get the cops called to your house because the neighbors think something is exploding and the house might burn into flames at any moment. The music is dense and my experience with Fernow's work is that there's never really a moment of silence or a space anywhere in the noise. It just keeps coming and coming until eventually it strips the paint off the walls and ejaculates it back in my face.
Black Vase is slightly different for a couple of reasons and those reasons make this a better album. First, drums and synthesizers make an appearance and provide fairly consistent rhythm to a few tracks whose sole instrument is Fernow's voice going completely off the edge and the mics shrieking their ear-shattering madness over and over again. A song like "Sorry Robin" benefits from these additions, sounding like a perverse new wave experiment in torturing small animals and children. The feedback rendered in the song takes an almost melodic role and the drums simply pound away in tribal fashion, eventually overloading the whole piece with Fernow shouting his strange lyrics. Those lyrics constitute the second aspect of his work that is either the most appealing or the most revolting aspect of Prurient. Undoubtedly sexual and almost certainly meant to emanate a violent attribute, Fernow's lyrics sound possessive and psychotic, the product of a child forced to live in a basement and meditate solely on what he can hear through the floorboards: his mother being beat or his father womanizing over the years.
The lyrics can sound a bit amateur at times, reaching from some erotic conclusion but not quite getting there because of the favor Fernow takes towards bluntness. A track like "Lord of Love," on the other hand, is perfect, ambiguously situated in some kind of cross-dressing fantasy created by an infatuation with a nameless woman. As excellent as Fernow is at forging harsh noise extravaganzas, he shines when he exhibits the ability to craft multi-layered songs that are as brooding as they are caustic. I get the feeling Black Vase could've been even more powerful if Fernow had decided to contain himself slightly more and fine-tune the record. Sometimes the silence is far scarier than the burst of anger of the explosion of hatred that accompanies death.
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