luckyPRICK

"Prick" Review

CMJ New Music Monthly, February 1995
By Konrad Vost
Transcribed by Robert Ferent

Scans:

Prick would make a great lounge band. It'd be in a club perched on the cusp of one of Dante's outer circles of Hell, to be sure, but a great lounge band just the same. There's enough fuzzed-out guitar evil and sinister sound sampling to satisfy the Inferno in-crowd, but the band's melodic sensibilities are too strong and its pop aspirations too apparent for this Trent Reznor signing to fully descend into the noise Hell that their label boss so fully embraces these days. While the lounge band description may seem a coy dismissal of the band's efforts, Prick's is no mean feat: crossing infernal noise into the pop realm requires equal parts of songwriting smarts and industrial ingenuity. The music, at times, sports almost Beatle-esque melodies ("Communique") as it digs and claws at the open wounds of pop. Still, even the record's rougher raging-guitar moments never lapse into the lunkheaded abandon of a band content to lead a chorus for converts. For all its industrial flourishes (and for that matter, the instant associations that the name Reznor carries these days), Prick is less of an industrial band than a return to goth-rock. The technology and means may be state of the industry, but the effect is age-old. And all the better for it.