Under the Roman Clamour (2016)

Post-Frozen Niagara Falls industrial music in a year of a relatively quiet Dominick Fernow (only two releases!!!). While that one was sprawling and ever-changing, Death Kneel focusses on one key idea which is (1980s) dystopian soundscapes, and microphones put through distortion pedals such that breathing becomes a low-key version of screaming. Under the Roman Clamour benefits from this limitation and by the second half the artist has expanded the familiar into new terrain. Fernow has said that Prurient is all concept, no entertainment (which fans know has not been the truth since 2006's Pleasure Ground), and one of the joys of Under the Roman Clamour is that Max Klebanoff doesn't pretend that there is a conflict there- even his harshest textures are all processed into something soothing

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Spiral (2016)

Resists (masculine?) noise tropes of screaming out sweet catharsis, Puce Mary builds atmospheres which are always on the brink of collapsing but never really do. The human voice is relatively soft and spoken, concerned with the way it appears to the listener while it reflects on the burden of the female body, but it's subsumed into the machine which feeds it back out in processed agony. There is no release, only tension and unease. Live she stands in front of the machine as it breaks free from control and overwhelms her- her role is to bring it back. Over the course of an hour she comes to understand it and then redirects its anger in a direction where she can become one with it, leaving the audience cowering and fearful. The Spiral tells a similar story but in song fragments and mini-atmospheres which bleed into each other. Its secret lies in the fact that it approaches the chaos/harmony machine/human dichotomies from the side of understanding and reconciliation rather than transcendence or rejection- its appeal is the terror and beauty that comes through restraint rather than domination.

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Pharm

There's a dry scream and then a 4-song conversation between the dirge-like and the frightened and hysterical. The former makes for a heavy and intoxicating listening experience, the latter's outbursts make you stop what you're doing with sweaty palms and look over there somewhere, sort of really stressed out. Crawling on Bruised Knees is like holy fuck. No idea why some noise releases make it out of the darkndoomy/s&m pit o despair and into the attention of 'hipsters' (malleable as always, here meaning I don't actually know, everyone?) and some don't, though it might have something to do with the lack of s&m, nazi shite, and c.p. found here, leaving just darkndoom and tracks like Crawling on Bruised Knees. THAT, the general public (hipsters) can handle, I think (evidently).

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