Next month Prurient will release a three-hour long record. That album is too long.
Admittedly, I haven’t heard Rainbow Mirror. Yes, I know, two thirds of you just clicked away, but I hope the rest of you will follow me, here.
I am, in general, an admirer of Prurient’s harsh and cinematic style of electronic noise. Parts of sole musician Dominick Fernow’s last record, 2015’s Frozen Niagara Falls floored me. I say parts because that record lasted for 90 minutes and I could only listen to it on whole about twice, so pretty quickly I had to take notes of which songs I liked and revisited those. Why revisit pieces instead of the whole? Because at 90 minutes, that album is too long.
Rainbow Mirror is part of a long trend of studio albums in metal getting overlong. Bell Witch’s latest Mirror Reaper is a single through-composed masterpiece that can’t be listened to seamlessly on LP or CD because it’s nearly an hour and a half long. Metallica released Hardwired… to Self Destruct as a double record when their best record doesn’t even crack the hour mark—this from a band that made a point of cramming as many songs as they could fit onto a single CD in the late 90s. Potmos Hetoimos released The Paragon Trisagion, a three-hour-long funeral doom record in 2015. The Paragon Trisagion is a hyper-indie passion project whereas Rainbow Mirror is a professional studio project being released by a prominent metal label, Profound Lore.
It is unreasonable to expect a modern adult to revisit pieces this long with undivided attention. The aforementioned albums are all worth listening to, but their potential listeners have lives to live; jobs to work, money to make, bills to pay in order to facilitate even a simple modern lifestyle; hopefully at least a handful of loved ones to socialize with and make that modern life worth living. Listening time comes in small doses. I don’t remember the last time I could listen to the 28 minutes of Reign in Blood without being called away on some critical life task. Our time is too valuable to sit for 180 minutes and give a record its first listen.
For example, here are several things one could do during the same time it takes to listen to Rainbow Mirror once.
The YouTube ID of JrM0fYWjZbc?feature=oembed is invalid.Fly Nonstop from Seattle to Los Angeles
Alaska Airlines can take me from my home in Seattle to the city of angels in two hours and thirty five minutes. Sure I should get to the Airport an hour before my flight at least, but I’m not listening to Prurient in the security line.
Take A Yoga Class
Organized stretching sounds a little hippie-dippie for the denim and leather crowd. Still, yoga’s a great supplement to any workout regiment, tones muscles and can lower blood pressure. The only workout Purient offers is lifting seven whole vinyl discs at once.
Watch Tarkovsky’s ‘Stalker’
Russian auteur Andrei Tarkovsky’s minimalist sci fi film ‘Stalker’ lasts two hours and 45 minutes. Most of it consists of gorgeous scenery shots and three dudes monologuing about the nature of mankind and god. That doesn’t sound like an ideal use of precious time either, but ‘Stalker’ is easily among the 50 best films ever produced. Will we remember Rainbow Mirror as one of the 50 best albums ever recorded? Odds are against it.
Read James Baldwin’s ‘The Fire Next Time’
Time has only made critic and public intellectual James Baldwin’s view on race relations more pertinent with time. That may sound dry, but Baldwin was a captivating writer, so the book’s 128 pages ought to fly right by.
Register to Vote
America’s public institutions look more unstable now than they have been since the Second World War, but democracy is not dead. Every vote counts. (Unless you live in New York and wanted to vote for a progressive Democratic candidate who could win the general election, but I digress.) If you don’t know how to get registered and are too lazy to Google then you’re definitely too lazy to sit through Rainbow Mirror, but you should click here to get started anyway.
Sign up for Obamacare
Both houses of Congress combined couldn’t stop this year’s Obamacare open enrollment period. That said, it’s been shortened to 45 days. You probably didn’t click on this article expecting a civics lesson. Well, I didn’t expect Prurient to release an unnecessarily long record. We might as well all try and get healthcare coverage out of it. Observe the market at Healthcare.gov.
The post Prurient’s New Album is Too Long appeared first on Decibel Magazine.
