Prurient, the main guise of Dominick Fernow, peels back the grislier aspects of the human condition within the boundaries of noise music. He doesn't just talk about desire and hate and pushing oneself in his music, he soaks those very feelings into his works. Within his massive discography, littered with limited-release tapes that can be frustrating to any would-be collector, are his "statement" records, which often introduce new elements that advance his artistic growth. Among these are 2006's Pleasure Ground, where his talents for rhythm really started to bloom, 2011's Bermuda Drain, his blackened new wave masterpiece, and 2013's Through The Window, where he nearly ditched noise for unknown-hours techno. Frozen Niagara Falls, Fernow's latest double album, is definitely one of his "statement records," and it brings back much of the harsh noise that faded away from his more recent works, but it's neither a "return to form" nor a retreat into his early career. With Niagara, he's taken strengths from his entire oeuvre to reach deeper into himself and produce what may be his best record yet, one that brings all the fulfillment of noise and transcends them all the same.
Fernow's moved back to New York from L.A., where he was briefly a member of Cold Cave, and Niagara cements that return. There's none of the techno of Window or any traces of his European adventures following his side project Vatican Shadow's frequent touring there, and only some of Bermuda's bizzaro synth-pop. There are no remaining traces of Fernow the underground playboy posting swanky selfies on OkCupid; on Niagara, he is once again the man standing shirtless outside in the New York winter. The closest to anything resembling Bermuda is "Every Relationship Earthrise", which would make for excellent darkwave if the hiccuping beat would hold still.
Fernow takes the tools most noise artists use as ends themselves and uses them to further narratives and enrich the compositions. Take "Traditional Snowfall", which starts off as a murder-romance fantasy—"I want to rip out your lower back/ And suck the air out of your lungs/ And wrap my hands around your neck/ And collapse your throat/ And squish your thorax/ And kiss you"—but turns into a rumination on the ambiguity so prevalent in modern love: "Friends are everywhere but I'm always leaving/ Dismantling us with rumors." (Maybe some of the club weariness of Window stuck around after all.) Fernow takes that confusion and buries it in the hisses and frantic electronics, so that it bleeds through every element of the track. Huge blasts of static and contact mic chaos come back into the fore, a passionate and turbulent dance between beauty and ugliness. To work with contrasts like that, on that deep a composition, is a rarity in noise.
It may seem weird that Prurient would have "hits" or "fan favorites," but they do exist. Fernow designed Niagara to be sprawling and cohesive, and there are multiple competing candidates for new ones here, across the spectrum. The first would probably be "Dragonflies to Sew You Up", with percussion that resemble Godflesh's drum machine becoming sentient and suffering a panic attack. Beneath the barrage, blue synthesizers and pianos chime, barely surviving the mortar-fire of the percussion. In the lyrics, Fernow flips the script on how lust is portrayed in noise—it's far from the simplistic objectification that comes too often with big, burly loud music. There's a conflicted pain when he screams, "IN AUGUST/ YOU'RE OVERDRESSED/ PLYWOOD BROKEN/ UP ON IMPACT." A line like "I promise I will only fuck prostitutes" may seem comical on paper, but add in the context of Fernow's vocal performance, and it's clear he takes no pleasure from yelling such a thing.
Fernow's synths sound both lusher and icier than they did on Drain, thanks to producer Arthur Rizk, known for his work on Power Trip's Manifest Decimation, Inquisition's Obscure Verses for the Multiverse, and other notable recent metal and hardcore records. Fernow has pushed the limits of what lo-fi can do—Pleasure in particular is a testament to the beauty of buried synths—but with his grander ambitions, he needed a bigger sound, and Rizk's contributions are so invaluable he may as well be Prurient's second member. Niagara is Prurient's most developed record, not just for its length, but the attention to detail that Rizk provides.
Fernow's original intent for Niagara was to source all of the material acoustically, with no electronics at all. That would have been radical, even for him. Still, upon first listen, it is jarring to hear acoustic guitars, provided by Rizk and Fernow, in the beginning of "Greenpoint", Niagara's peak New York song. From there, it descends into throbs of darkness, but that's only part of the point of the song. While "Greenpoint" is about someone Fernow knew, when I read the lyrics my mind went to Oliver Sacks' New Yorker essay on monologist Spalding Gray's descent into irreversible depression that led to his suicide in 2004. Gray's thoughts of suicide always centered around drowning and his mother, whose own suicide figured heavily into his work, and it's eerie that "The East River isn't romantic anymore you know/ That's where the suicides go/ Or maybe that's what you want in the end/ To be mixed together and reunited with your mother" are almost as if they were about him. It's specific yet flexible, adding another layer of complexity as only Fernow can.
Like "Greenpoint", closer "Christ Among the Broken Glass" shows a side of Prurient that is sometimes overlooked: poignancy. It's also the closest thing to Fernow's original vision for Niagara, which makes it an even more appropriate ending. The sound of fire combines with the guitars, evoking a séance more than a campfire. Like "I Understand You", the closing track from JK Flesh and Prurient's Worship Is the Cleansing of the Imagination where fragile glimmers of serenity are eaten without mercy by squalling feedback, "Christ" reveals itself slowly. Niagara was recorded "in the spirit of homelessness," and Fernow's lyrics in "Christ" capture how winter brutalizes the homeless and how self-sacrifice can make one appear messianic, especially when that figure is among the afflicted themselves. The man, "Jesus of cities," becomes both more noble and more destitute with every verse—"Cobbling together syllables/ Over a frostbitten tongue/ Trying to remember the prayers"—though this isn't about pity, but about reality. Fernow's hushed vocals don't even come in until close to the end of the song, and they make his silent stalker tone on Window sound pronounced in comparison. Who knew that one of the least noisy Prurient songs would strike the deepest?
A double noise album is a lot to take in, and Prurient's never been about accessibility. He's also not about acceptable signifiers; he's bigger than noise. He offers an endless, probing self-exploration that simply isn't found in noise, metal, hardcore, power electronics, whatever harsh music you can think of. In that regard, Niagara is a landmark not just in Prurient's discography, but within extreme music. His few utterances in "Falling Mask" sum up the experience of the album, and of his body of work: "What we do/ We invite pain/ It's ok to be hungry/ Hunger is normal/ I'll meet you there." He knows Prurient isn't for everybody, and that's part of the appeal, but if you're not going to invite growth and reveal yourself, why bother?