Prison

A second scorcher from Prison lets the listener further into the band’s hollow earth hovel, an album full of charred sonics and battered blues. Featuring members of RSTB faves Endless Boogie, and sharing a similar passion for gnarled riffs wrapped around the listener in coils that grow tighter by the minute, the band’s latest record takes a few ounces of flesh off the listener. A companion to the band’s last album, Upstate, the new record revels in the street level dirt and dirge of Downstate. Not that the last album was pastoral by any means, but the new record employs a windows down scroll through city sonics, scraping through the doppler blur of blues riffs off the bricks, noise floor fumes that funnel from the overpass, and broken-busked folk that seethes with hunger. At its heart, Downstate is a raw wound that refuses to heal and the band seems set on poking at it to generate heat.

From the primal yowl of “Eyes For Keys,” to the hallucinogen drip of “Traveling Lady,” the band constantly pulls the pavement out from under the listener. Even when there seems to be a set groove on “Up in a Tree,” employing funk dented brass, the band’s always waiting around the corner with a sock full of quarters, ready to take the wind out of the listener. Aside from the boys in Boogie and perhaps Weak Signal, there aren’t a lot of bands still mapping out the muck that runs rivers through the city these days. NYC’s gone a bit soft at the seams, but Prison’s still out there ripping through threads until the frayed edges are all that’s left. In days like these, we need the burlap chafe of Prison, probably more than ever.

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