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Prolapse

Ghosts of Dead Aeroplanes

(Jetset)

Prolapse’s post-punk, guitar noise rock is hypnotic, trance-inducing, and mind-blowing all at once. Blending white sheets of guitar squalls that rise and fall like ocean waves with sleepy, dub beats (most notably on “Cylinders V12 Beats Cylinders 8”), Ghosts of Dead Aeroplanes is a cathartic tour-de-force that sounds staggeringly original and borrows inspiration from Sonic Youth, Krautrock, electronica, Gang of Four, Joy Division and My Bloody Valentine.


Disparate musical elements, layered dynamics, the counterpoint of Mick Derrick’s frenetic chanting and Linda Steelyard’s cool vocals, sharp textures, frantic rhythms, and percolating synthesizers contribute to a brutally resonant concoction. It’s rock, but there’s something symphonic at work in Ghosts of Dead Aeroplanes. Maybe it’s that the album truly feels like a coherent whole, with each song building off the ideas and momentum created by the previous song. It is only in its entirety that this record really makes sense. It’s also a huge step forward for this Leicester band, which has suddenly jumped to the front of line of “bands who count.”

Rating:

Sarah Zupko is a former Executive Producer at Tribune Media Services, the media syndication arm of the Tribune Company, and a 10-year veteran of Tribune Company. Aside from writing novels and plays, she devotes most of her time and energy to running PopMatters.com and formerly PopCultures.com, as well as research in the fields of Slavic and German history, and general European cultural and intellectual history. Zupko studied musicology, film, and drama at the University of Chicago and media theory at the University of Texas, where she received her M.A. in 1995.


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