A couple of weeks ago I saw Prolapse play live in London. I went on a hunch, having seen them play and bought their classic debut album Pointless Walks to Dismal Places around the time it came out, but having not listened to it in many years. The show was fantastic, and gave me an opportunity to rediscover the band and delve into its back catalogue.
Originally founded in Leicester in 1992, Prolapse was active till around 2000. The band’s music combined the obstinate primitivism of punk, the relentless driving monotony of krautrock, the accumulative walls of guitars of Branca-influenced post-punk, and the liquid intertwined arpeggios of post-rock. Over the years they also gradually incorporated more droney, shoegazey and noisy electronica sounds into their palate.
In the classic Prolapse track, the drums dominate an intense but expansive mix, underpinned by a fat and hypnotic bass. Based on repetitive riffs, the music gets gradually more and more entrenched in its own groove. Nevertheless, small variations in sound, pitch, harmony, strumming pattern, drum configuration and so on keep shifting the tone and the point of view. The overall mood recalls the grey-on-grey sound of the Smiths’ first album, with every now and again one of the three guitars stepping out of the density to stick out its head and add a different dimension to the picture. The two vocalists play off of each other in their own slightly chaotic version of the boy-girl duo, a kind of spoken- or more often than not shouted-word performance.
Prolapse followed their debut LP with Backsaturday, which feels less like a full-fledged album than a sketchbook of experiments with repetitive rhythms, untried sounds and ambient noise. Then came The Italian flag, a return to the song-led territory of Pointless Walks, this time taking a somewhat less desolate turn, at times sounding a bit like Lush with a lot more oomph and grit . Their last full-length album, Ghosts of Dead Aeroplanes, was a more subdued and possibly less thought-out affair, though not without its own gorgeous moments, mainly to do with some experimentation with keyboards and electronics. In between they released an impressive number of singles and EPs.
Prolapse live shows are known for being really powerful experiences, and this last one did not disappoint. In a way that reminded me of another raucously artistic and somewhat forgotten band from a minor British city, the Mekons, this tight yet organic performance too was never far from out-of-control feedback loops and a kind of transcendental and unnerving drunken mayhem.