If you recognize Joumana Kayrouz, there’s a good chance you once owned a Michigan driver’s license. A prolific billboard siren, the 60-year-old accident attorney turned local celebrity dons black leather and flashes a steely gaze beneath platinum blonde hair in roadside ads welcoming weary bands home to the Detroit metro radius. Prostitute singer Moe readily admits he wants to please her—and, for that matter, any woman who withholds her approval in favor of pursuing justice. On the Dearborn noise rockers’ debut, Attempted Martyr, he devotes an entire song to singing Kayrouz’s praises: that deep plum lipstick an exegesis for Lysistrata, her “rose red wine” scent binding the triad of pre-Islamic Arabian goddesses. “It’s time to design a woman,” he howls. Prostitute needn’t resort to begging for punishment to prove their love—not when their splintering industrial post-punk already feels like getting run over by truck.
Much like Kayrouz, who fled the Lebanese Civil War as a young woman and now funds community spaces in her former homeland, Prostitute’s bold aesthetic choices risk concealing the fervency of their passion. On Attempted Martyr, they wield guitars like wire-wrapped sledgehammers, each melody more densely thistled than the last. During “Senegal,” Ross Babinski’s metal riffs gurgle like they’re desperate for air. On “M. Dada,” drummer Andrew Kaster hammers down like he’s spawned additional limbs, racing to outpace bassist Dylan Zaranski; the higher Babinski’s fingers climb on the guitar, the more vertiginous the rataplan. The sheer volume of their collective experimental aggression makes “Judge” almost meditative.
Noise rock frontmen are practically required to holler and scream like they’re losing their minds, and while Moe (whose last name doesn’t appear online) observes this unspoken rule, there’s something else driving his madness. With two hands pressed on his keyboard to cue samples of flutes and horns, he’s tethered to reality even while shouting out visions of bloody vengeance and religious ecstasy. As if to prove sanity is still within reach, he opens “Body Meat” in a dry post-punk deadpan before launching into a paranoid suicide proposal: “What am I worth if not glorified and adorned in flames?” Moe and Kaster’s lyrics can lacerate with image alone: hands sewn shut by needle and thread, bodies writhing in pools of spit, a human head impaled on a steeple. To call Attempted Martyr “intense” is somehow still underselling it.
Yet the most impactful parts of Attempted Martyr aren’t its crushing hooks or its relentless punk bacchanal. It’s Moe’s ability to turn the real-life nightmares of his Lebanese family and friends, war-torn realities reduced to the label of “foreign policy” in the U.S., into disturbingly poetic lyrics. Attempted Martyr was written and recorded “under duress of a world in turmoil,” the band states, and is “dedicated to Lebanon, from Dearborn with love.” In recent months, Prostitute have performed at benefits for Palestine, Lebanon, and Sudan. No wonder, then, that Moe screams about a suzerain’s tightening grip, apostles turned into pimps, and humans traded like slaves. “True glory’s claimed through gore,” he snarls on “All Hail,” “Just watch me push the button and make history repeat.” The song samples the Japanese experimental rock band Ground Zero’s 1997 epic “Consume Red,” looping a passage played on hojok until, much like in the original song, the instrument’s nasally calls take on an air of liberation by way of desecration. Both artists make a point of using repetition to overwhelm until it reaches a breaking point; in the silence that follows, a weight is lifted.
Particularly for a debut, Attempted Martyr is remarkably polished. Having found their footing in Michigan dive bars stippled with veterans patches and presidential doodles, Prostitute spent the past four years perfecting their live show without softening any of its rabid emotion. Although their distorted punk pairs well with Midwestern bands they’ve opened for, like the Armed or Angry Blackmen, Prostitute are no imitators. The album’s two slower numbers, “In the Corner Dunce” and “Harem Induction Hour,” demonstrate that their rage is equally effective in slow motion. After seven dizzying minutes of churn, the latter song closes the album by gradually decelerating and yawning into a high-pitched, blown-out swell not dissimilar to the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life.” “Was it only a daydream?” asks Moe, knowing we can hardly afford to be so naive.
