How Dominick Fernow made the transition from home taping noise artist to celebrated techno musician still baffles me. I do not think it was a trajectory anyone could have imagined or expected, but that is exactly what happened. To that fact, Remember Your Black Day makes for his first LP proper amidst confusing limited tape formats and vinyl collections of out of print material. To that end, it does sound like a fully realized album, but is still distinctly Vatican Shadow, for better or worse.
For me, my exposure to the project was an mp3 download of questionable legality of one of the first releases, and I was rather surprised at what I had heard.While Prurient releases up until that point had occasionally flirted with melody or rhythm, it was always hidden amongst layer after layer of noise and feedback.Here it was up front, with just the right amount of raw, low fidelity production to keep it in line with Fernow's other work.
I did not, however, find it to be some revolutionary discovery, or a project I thought would have the impact that it has.It was moody, interlocking loops, appropriately spiky FM synths and sparse drum machines.If it had been a major hit within the noise scene Fernow started from, I would assume it had something to do with the novelty and unexpectedness.But its acceptance into the wider world of electronic music caught me completely by surprise.
To be fair, there is definite development and expansion of the sound here."Enter Paradise," released as a teaser before the album came out is perhaps the most striking song here, and shows Fernow's development in instrumentation and approach since those earliest releases.The slow, but unrelenting digital snare punch and what is either sampled guitar or a very guitar-like synth line is simple and repetitive, but triumphs in that structural simplicity.Album closer "Jet Fumes Above the Reflecting Pool" borrows a similar overall sound to "Enter Paradise," but with a slower, more introspective pacing and significantly more variation throughout.
"Not the Son of Desert Storm, But the Child of Chechnya" also works its repetition well, with a rapid fire beat that mixes things up (drum and bass snares, electro handclaps) amidst distortion and dirty, grimy layers of synthesizer."Tonight Saddam Walks Amidst Ruins" has a nice surge in synthesizer towards its latter third that layers on tension beautifully.Throughout the album there is a greater sense of feel and structure, and not just seemingly haphazard starting/stopping of loops that plagued some of the earlier works.
"Remember Your Black Day," however, is where things begin to fall a bit short.A rapid, galloping rhythm that exhibits little change for its eight minute duration obscures some nicely understated rising/falling synth pads, but stretched over that length, the novelty gets lost in a sea of repetition that does not manage to be nearly as gripping as "Enter Paradise".Cut back a few minutes, it could be great, but here it just seems to go on for far too long.
Remember Your Black Day is the most realized Vatican Shadow release to date, and definitely feels the most consistent.It is not, however, a revolutionary piece of art that is going to change the face of electronic music as we know it, regardless of what the hype around it (and Vatican Shadow in general) might seem to indicate.It is a good disc of 1980s industrial influenced music that is not always quite danceable.With that in mind though, I enjoyed this disc quite a bit, and definitely as a whole more than I have the other releases thus far, which I have found could be patchy at times.
