"Time's arrow" is a lovely phrase to describe the seeming unidirectional progression of time, the sense that it's been traveling perpetually forward from the Big Bang to whatever the ending point of the universe will happen to be. It's also the cheeky title of Dominick Fernow's new Prurient EP, which itself rumbles inexorably and sometimes unbearably forward until it reaches a Big Crunch that sounds as apocalyptic as the one promised by some physicists. The five tracks here seem to be slowly shedding the trappings of music itself, all the dark-pop armature Fernow has grafted onto Prurient's old shriek-the-pain-away sound over the last few years, until all that remains is fearsome and formless noise.
On Time's Arrow, the comforts of familiar rhythm and melody are stripped back, track by track, to reveal the snarling, primal sound mass from which they were beaten into shape. With a jittery programmed beat that recalls Big Black at their most despondent and yet more sour synth squiggles that prove John Carpenter is the biggest influence on the darker end of electronic music in the 21st-century, the title track takes off from the creepy-but-clearly-defined hooks of Prurient's brilliant Bermuda Drain album from earlier in 2011. It's a possible contender for jam-of-the-year for all the ex-goths, one-time industrial obsessives, and collectors of soundtracks from obscure 1980s horror movies. But the rest of the EP sounds like it was made by a lunatic from one of those obscure 80s horror movies, as if that deranged slasher had somehow escaped into real world and been asked to record a few tunes for a cassette label. And you can imagine the sort of emotions such a jolly fellow would want to express through sound.
So the beat becomes a nearly arrhythmic clattering on "Let's Make a Slave". They keyboard melodies become cover-your-ears squeals of distortion, as if someone were jabbing a knife into an amplifier. Following the brooding but almost catchy "Time's Arrow", Fernow's most conventional song yet, order itself seems to be breaking down across the rest of the EP, a vibe brought home by the blasted, end-of-the-world atmosphere and Fernow's increasingly desperate last-man-on-Earth vocal perfomances. By "Maskless Face", his eerie monotone monologues have given away to frustrated howlings that express nothing but rage, and even that connection to human pain is severed by the EP's end. "Slavery in the Bahamas" plays like a rapid-fire tape collage of the ugliest sounds the post-industrial world has to offer-- the spluttering of downed power lines, the disembodied groans of information sluicing through a modem, buildings and machinery being crushed to nothing-- as if the whole show was coming to a swift and brutal end.
But Time's Arrow ends not in a deafening silence after the final track’s implosion. It's perhaps no accident that "Slavery in the Bahamas" ends with the faint sound of a lovely tune sneaking its way out of the squall. If you play the EP on a loop, this snatch of pleasant human music-making seems to lead quite naturally back into the title cut. Of course if you then play the EP straight through again, everything comes crashing down once more. With a kind of grim pleasure, Time's Arrow suggests that all that effort, writing songs and constructing coherent albums, will always eventually give way to the chaos that rumbles dangerously under any attempt to impose control over noise, if you just let go.
