Vatican Shadow follows up his debut album Remember Your Black Day with a new EP of material that, if anything, is even better.
Vatican Shadow’s eagerly anticipated debut album Remember Your Black Day was announced quite some time before its October 2013 release date, arriving to both mixed reviews and a certain level of disappointment from the public. Just a few weeks later, however, Hospital Productions pulled the same trick that Modern Love did with Miles’ debut album ‘Faint Hearted,’ by releasing the “addendum” EP When You Are Crawling that, in many respects, turned out to be vastly superior to the album it post-scripts.
How? Well, firstly it contains two of the best new Vatican Shadow tracks for some time in the forms of “Al Quaeda” and “Atta’s Apartment Slated For Demolition”. Secondly, the new “Bouthayna Traditions” mix of “Remember Your Black Day” takes the original album title track and sand-blasts it, drying, scouring and flattening the mix to create a more dancefloor-friendly track lacks the depth of focus the original but is somehow much easier to listen to. And thirdly, album track “Not The Son Of Desert Storm, But The Child Of Chechnya” actually works far better in the context of the tracks on When You Are Crawling than on Remember Your Black Day.
First of the new tracks is “Al Quaeda,” packed with woozy, heat-stroke pads, and jangling keys that, combined with relentless, marching military band beats and smooth percussion makes for an evocative and propulsive nine minutes that are over before you know it. “Atta’s Apartment Slated For Demolition” was actually the title of a previously released cassette/digital EP, but the track itself did not feature, appearing here as the “Bouthayna Engineering” mix. This mighty fifteen minute pulsing and hypnotic techno stomper changes up and down, stutters, adds and removes layers of percussion, ambient washes and haunting vocal intonations at perfectly paced intervals.
When You Are Crawling actually comes across more as an alternative version of Remember Your Black Day than an addendum and, at just over 35 minutes, isn’t even that much shorter. The trouble with these addendum EPs is that they run the risk of being overlooked once the hype and anticipation for the new album has faded. In fact why release these two extra tracks as a separate EP at all when the album is already quite short, not to mention home to varied styles and moods? Including them there could have helped flesh Remember Your Black Day out into a much harder hitting and better paced double album than its extant incarnation.
Instead, I find myself recommending that if you have the option to check these Vatican Shadow releases out yourself, go for the fantastic When You Are Crawling and leave the good but uneven Remember Your Black Day until later.
When You Are Crawling is available on Hospital Productions.
