Remember Your Black Day is officially the “debut” Vatican Shadow album, featuring eight purpose-written tracks with a broader subject matter and greater narrative structure hailing a deliberate shift away from the richly layered, grungy collage style of old towards a more direct contact with the audience.
In 2010 Dominick Fernow issued Byzantine Private CIA, the debut release as Vatican Shadow via his then New York based Hospital Productions, which turned out to be the first in a steady stream of cassette-only releases featuring his newly minted war-on-terror themed output. The problem was, of course, that in spite of the cassette showing something of a resurgence in recent years it remained an exceptionally niche delivery mechanism with correspondingly limited reach.
Thankfully, having consequently become the focus of much critical and public acclaim thanks to this often controversial material, Fernow has spent the last couple of years reissuing some of the most crucial Vatican Shadow releases in vinyl and digital formats on a variety of labels, including his own.
The press blurb boldly claims, however, that Remember Your Black Day is officially the “debut” Vatican Shadow album, featuring eight purpose-written tracks with a broader subject matter and greater narrative structure than previously released singles and EPs. It also hails a deliberate shift away from the richly layered, grungy collage style of old towards a more “direct contact with the audience,” something that really began with the storming September Cell EP on sister label Bed of Nails.
The trouble is, it doesn’t quite deliver the goods.
The distorted PA announcements that crackle through the dense, toxic fog of reverb and snare of promising opener “Circumstances Quickly Became Questioned” are palpably tense, thrilling and atmospheric, but the track ends after a mere thirty-one seconds before the album abruptly veers off down more minimal, synthesizer led paths. There’s a lumbering, wounded and reflective feeling to much of Remember Your Black Day that is typified by the appropriately titled “Tonight Saddam Walks Amidst Ruins,” the blackened ambience and bleak synths intensely evocative of a blasted and derelict aftermath to some terrible conflict or terrorist atrocity.
But it doesn’t take long before you get the creeping feeling that something isn’t quite right here. Perhaps it’s the unexpectedly slow pacing that the rather weedy, clanging snares, reedy, elasticated synths and rather effete twirls of smoking FX that colour “Muscle Hijacker Tribal Affiliation” do little to alleviate. Four tracks in and even “Contractor Corpses Hung Over The Euphrates River” isn’t quite hitting the mark: the machine gunned beats return along with a more familiar growl and grate that hints at former glories, but the thing just has no guts, failing to engage the listener by propelling the album forward in that taut, thrilling manner possessed by many other Vatican Shadow releases.
It isn’t until “Enter Paradise” opens (and you’ll have already flipped the vinyl LP over to Side B by this point) that you feel Vatican Shadow has truly arrived. This track belies its minimal content—little more than a looped black metal guitar riff, ominous chanting crowd and powerful bass thump—via brilliant production and Fernow’s exceptional ear for source material to become a truly hypnotic desert stomper. The title track is also particularly effective, slowly but surely piling layer upon layer of background atmospherics and additional percussion over its relentlessly rattling kick-drums, a track you can easily imagine destroying the dancefloor at a live gig.
The dancefloor shaking stomp of “Not The Son Of Desert Storm, But The Child Of Chechnya” would serve as a stunning transitional interlude were it not preceded by the similarly skeletal rhythms of that title track, as it is brilliantly followed by contrasting humidity, smoking skies and heat refracting airstrip surfaces of “Jet Fumes Above The Reflecting Pool,” which turns out to be Fernow at his simmering best but sadly announces the end of the album rather than heralding its beginning.
So why isn’t Remember Your Black Day gelling in the way that everyone hoped it would? Well, for a start it isn’t a relentless, wall-of-sound concept piece like Type’s reissue of Kneel Before Religious Icons with its grimy palette and chopped/sliced tracks, so why retain the abrupt tape-cut to silence or rapidly fading endings to certain tracks? It worked before, but on a release that purports to pursue a more narrative thrust and variety, it feels out of place… almost lazy. When you’re caught so off guard by such an abrupt ending that you end up checking to make sure there hasn’t been a genuine transcoding error, worry.
Furthermore, like the recent work of Ricardo Donoso, Remember Your Black Day seems to take a more reactive approach to composition, revealing a dessicated, skeletal work that, unlike Donoso’s recent work, somehow fails to engage or endure in the memory. Then again, one single misfire amongst a torrent of other excellent releases as Vatican Shadow, Prurient, Christian Cosmos (with Kris Lapke) and now Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement is not exactly a bad track record, and it’s not as if there isn’t some really great stuff here, indeed a few tracks must rank as some of his best work. Remember Your Black Day is never less than interesting, but in some ways is better listened to piecemeal than as a complete album.
Remember Your Black Day is available on Hospital Productions.
