In the past three years, Vatican Shadow—the techno racket of Prurient mastermind and Hospital Productions honcho Dominick Fernow—has released more than a dozen aesthetically coherent cassettes, EPs and singles. They’ve been united not only by the music, an electronic blur of deep-thudding beats and synthesizer fuselage veiled with a sense of mystery, but also by their use of military smut. Like a set of early 90 baseball cards, those initial offerings paired depictions of the players of the armed forces—Joe Biden on Larry King Live, Hilary Clinton in front of a Pakistani flag, soldiers prepared for a chemical attack—with antagonistic phrases ripped from headlines or wartime jargon: Operation Neptune Spear, Washington Buries Al Qaeda Leader at Sea, Ghosts of Chechnya. Fernow has insisted that the imagery reflects no overt political agenda except an interest in the byzantine machinations of global governments. Still, Vatican Shadow has hinged on implied provocation: Linked with these wordless, throbbing collages and elliptical structures, what did it all mean?
The pattern continues on Vatican Shadow’s proper debut LP, Remember Your Black Day. (After releasing a mountain of music, dubbing this a “debut” is in itself a wink and nudge.) The title is taken from a controversial chalk illustration drawn in front of the United States embassy in Cairo last year, on September 11, with those words written in Arabic around a Star of David. On the cover, a city skyline smolders. On the back, an aquamarine operations map of The Middle East sports an Old Testament paraphrase and a quote from Chris Kyle, the Navy SEAL known as the American military’s best sniper ever until a fellow veteran suffering from post traumatic stress disorder murdered him at a gun range earlier this year. The titles reflect previous Vatican Shadow suspects (Saddam Hussein, Chechnya, terrorists) and otherwise work to trigger related hot buttons—“Contractor Corpses Hung Over the Euphrates River,” for instance. It’s dangerous, ridiculous stuff, illustrative not only of the damage that war engenders but also of the hyperbolic, internal anti-logic it can foster.
On Remember Your Black Day, however, the meticulously upheld image of Vatican Shadow starts to feel more rigorous than the music itself. For a proper debut album, Remember Your Black Day is little more than a smattering of interesting electronic textures separated by spans of great ennui. Each of these eight pieces revolves around permutations of a beat and a web of accompanying sounds—lurid synthesizers, ominous samples, maligned guitars. Fernow is their puppet master, squeezing or stretching the rhythms and decorating the rests around them. During “Muscle Hijacker Tribal Affiliation", for instance, he begins with a wet snare sequence, a snarling synthesizer stretched across its edges like barbed wire. The beat disappears, leaving only the noise, a new loop of three big kick drum hits and a refracted guitar line that invokes a sinister side of dub. The snare returns, and Fernow pushes all the elements together until the music starts to tighten around the listener, an interrogation chamber closing in on the subject. But then the song sits still, satisfied with providing the mere intimation of a feeling, not the reasons for or consequences of it. The track’s title does the dirty work. As a producer, Fernow feels strangely hands off from his suggested source matter with Vatican Shadow. This antiseptic approach is far removed from his viscera-and-violence work as Prurient.
Even the most aggressive moments here eventually feel vacuous: “Enter Paradise” revolves around the coupling of a martial pulse and a menacing guitar riff, referencing Fernow’s predecessor and peer Justin Broadrick. He adds vocals here, too, his shouts broadcast through an echo chamber of effects. It’s mean and unforgiving, a sound that might finally do the ostensible subjects justice. Fernow adds a handclap rhythm toward the middle, too, its stutter and spring adding welcome contrast (and some levity) to the piece’s central stomp. But its six minutes accomplish little more than the action described; as the song fades into the distance, so does its impact. Likewise, the title track builds into a concussive cataract, a torrent of rhythms laced by an eerie church organ in the distance. The sound is great, but it’s not worth these stagnant eight minutes.
Remember Your Black Day repeatedly suggests something that it never becomes: dangerous. Whether it’s viewed with irony or in earnest, all this war iconography begins to feel like false provocation. Whiffs of controversy and confrontation serve as the bait, but the music—more harmless than harrowing—cannot follow it. In the end, this album might best be heard as fodder for Fernow’s fellow producers and remixers, a disappointing result for a proper debut that follows a torrent of better material. The chemtrails radiating from the beat during the back half of the title track, the stutter-and-tumble of “Contractor Corpses", the bleary-eyed wobble of “Tonight Saddam Walks Amidst Ruins”: These intriguing beats and atmospheres deserve to be ripped open and piled upon. Otherwise, all these nested layers of samples and beats and propaganda wrap infinitely around a hollow core, making for excitable music that eventually collapses into boredom.
