When Prolapse released their last album, Ghosts of Dead Airplanes, the internet was assumed to be a passing fad and Napster was still months away from being invented. The world the Leicester Polytechnic graduates left behind in 1999 was one where John Peel’s Festive 50 and the Evening Session were king, with exposure coming from ads placed in the inkies leading readers to seek out a group that named themselves after a rectal collapse.
Twenty-six years later comes I Wonder When They’re Going To Destroy Your Face, a pleasing anachronism landing on a very different planet. Even though the band had reformed for some dates a decade ago, it’s a return that feels as unexpected as a reappearance from the ghost of Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra. Prolapse are a phantasm from a bygone era where well-honed, fuzzy indie propelled by snarling, lurching bass could land you in the lower reaches of the top 100. The obsession with the spectral is still there (‘Ghost In The Chair’; ‘Ectoplasm United’) and the triple attack guitars are so thick that any manner of spirit could be hiding in its cacophonous layers. Particularly thick is ‘Jackdaw’, a song so sludgy, bellicose and dyspeptic that you wonder if they’ll find the strength to fight their way to its conclusion.
Most important to the Prolapse formula is the contrasting interplay between vocalists ‘Scottish’ Mick Derrick and Linda Steelyard, coming together in characteristic cognitive dissonance-inducing effect on their fifth studio album, especially on the peppy ‘Err On The Side Of The Dead’. ‘Cha Cha Cha 2000’, too, sounds like it could be a take on the Velvet Underground’s ‘The Gift’, only with varying perspectives rather than that of the one protagonist sitting in a box expectantly. Derrick’s rough and ready Glaswegian sprechgesang and Steelyard’s more clipped delivery have always combined in a discombobulating manner, providing varying points of view that aren’t necessarily related – often in the same song – a collective abstraction that allows listeners to bring their own interpretations to the sonic melee.
In this interconnected world we live in now, Prolapse have become more of an international proposition than ever before. Spread across the UK and Scandinavia, pursuing various fields including archeology (the subject they studied at poly), they’re signed to the Hamburg label Tapete, the longer-running sister label of the more visible Bureau B. If they’re a band out of time then they’re adapting to their surroundings well. And who knows, maybe there’ll be time to excavate some more ghosts yet.
