Written by: Dave Cantrell

It’s almost supernatural, the way some bands can rearise out of a cloud of smoke and seeming ruin after a full quarter-century of silence like they’re fucking rock’n’roll avatars that, apparently, never really left but rather took a wee break in the refuge-like corners of the one-of-a-kind powerhouse they built for themselves lo those many years ago and now they’re back – all seven of them in this case – as if, y’know, they simply took a moment to grab a cuppa that, oops, just happened to last twenty-six bloody years. While in itself remarkably rare (not least that still-intact septet aspect), what’s rarer still is for them to present as fiercely – if not more fiercely still – as they did in that initial stretch. However, as it’s Prolapse we’re talking about here, we can say their – much-welcomed – reunion comes as something of a surprise but the banging, shockingly good material? Yeah, not so much, and in fact not at all.

Emerging from Leicester in  the midst of the startling wave of new music that swamped the scenes on both sides of the pond in 1992-93 and qualifying one of the only bands that matched Th’ Faith Healers at their (sadly brief) peak, Prolapse was also one of those fairly rare bands/artists that truly ‘burst’ into renown with such fervor, drive, and hair-on-fire talent that they presented as much as a force of nature as band (which, yes, is as it should always be but we all know how truly rare it is). As a result, as it is with any entity that arrives in such a surge of take-no-prisoners power, that initial tsunami, having washed with no small fervor across the last millennium’s final decade, receded from center stage and into the wings where, cut the power and dim the lights, the name ‘Prolapse’ resided in lasting memory with a distinct power and verve, the ‘never’ in ‘never to be heard from again’ held in skeptical disbelief by their legion of faithful fans, an ever-wishful doubt that now, with the arrival of I Wonder When They’re Going to Destroy Your Face (possible album title of the year, no?), has been rewarded in, as is said, no uncertain terms.

Given its inherent intensity a nonetheless diverse outing, IWWTGTDYF (released August 29th on Tapete), at its center, never stints on the integrity at the heart of the band’s power, which flourishes no matter the pace nor level of sheer force with which its presented. In short, a keen emphasis presides throughout, tinged and bolted at its base to a somewhat Anglicized Krautrockism, lashed to an energy that refuses to diminish.

Kicking off with a persistent, unabashed pulse and throb, “The Fall of Cashline” rather indicates with some conviction that this ‘time’ (and, by assoiciation, ‘age’) thing is, indeed, some sort of farce, a construct for suckers, an assertion driven home on this opener as it burns through any doubts a long-ish hiatus might present like so many slips of touch paper. Following up, “Cha Cha Cha 2000” is what is technically called ‘catchy as fuck’ even as it looms with a sort of lucent ominsousness. Then there’s the marvelously-titled “Err on the Side of the Dead” that to these ears suggests the sound shadow of Th’ aforementioned Faith Healers still casts itself across the firmament never to die [an assessment, BTW, that were it TFH that had so vibrantly reappeared instead of Prolapse I’d quite certainly be using the same comparative only in reverse order]. Then, in the center of this remarkably astute maelstrom sits, well, “Ghost in the Chair,” a lengthy (7+ minutes) treatise that takes much of what’s been thus posited up to now regarding this track and that and swallows it in one breathtaking gulp. As ominous – that word again – as it is luminous, quietly sneaking up and past you like some omnipresent shadow you’re only just now noticing, the track, somehow, both anchors the album entire and, in its beguiling (dis)quietude, stands outside it, above it, beyond it, leaving one feeling stunned without knowing precisely how that stunning happened, a trick that, now we think about it, seems to be embedded in this lot’s DNA.

And so one moves through this tribute to relentlessness in service to a talent well aware of both its own potentinal and the shimmering limitations of what’s possible when seven artists convene to make a noise that can’t/won’t be easily forgotten. You hear that unmatched ambition inside the intense, spellbinding build-and-release of “On the Quarter Days,” on the unrelenting surge of “Cacophony C,” dense but agile, on “Jackdaw” which pushes through any and all boundaries of typical ‘songcraft’ that would see all of Pere Ubu past and present stand and applaud (appropriate give that the – intended, we suspect – first word’s out of singer Mick Derrick’s mouth are Three minutes to Cleveland) and even, perhaps especially, the gentle, yearnful unspooling of “A Forever” that closes the album, Miss Linda (Steelyard) and Mr Mark, the other five, with something of a mournful stride, wandering alongside, all walking softly down the Appian Way, sunrise behind them, sunset ahead, cessation imminent but certainly not soon, not with this lot. Even at a reflective pace, whispering to The Fates, Prolapse pushes itself toward what’s possible.

A triumph of an album, then, albeit a bit of a spectral one, presenting at every new step (whether down the Appian Way or not) a weight of history that will not countenance being forgotten, the result a piece of work that holds in some sort of existential embrace the paradox of what’s-to-come forever in debt to what preceded it that, regardless, somehow persists that hope will forever push foward despite the weight it pulls behind it.

* – understand that as of this writing there’s still a (questionably imposed) tariff in place preventing Tapete from shipping to the US

David Jeffreys – guitar

Pat Marsen – guitar

Tim Pattison – drums

Mick Harrison – bass

Donald Ross Skinner – guitar