PRURIENT & KEVIN DRUMM "All Are Guests In The House Of The Lord" (Hospital Productions)
Kevin Drumm has been laying low for, like, five years now. Compared to other artists of his age, talent and near-mythic stature, his music is vastly under-documented. In fact, the only truly satisfying, large-scale work he has released since 2002's Sheer Hellish Miasma was 2007's remastered rerelease of Sheer Hellish Miasma. Hopefully, his forthcoming cassette, Purge, on iDEAL can satiate the masses, because All Are Guests In The House Of The Lord does not. In 2007, Drumm release two high-profile collaboration albums with other A-List noise dudes-- this one with Prurient, and the disappointing Gauntlet with Daniel Menche. Both suffer from the same problem: the dominating aesthetic is that of his collaborators and not his own. There is almost nothing recognizable of Drumm on this tape. Presumably, he provided Prurient's Dominic Fernow with the creepy droney pads which sit under Fernow's embarrassingly histrionic vocals. But did he really need to? This sounds just like a Prurient tape-- a little doomier than some of his other stuff, but if I hadn't seen the cover to this tape before I listened to it, I'd have thought it was Fernow solo, no question. I don't mind artists I love playing second fiddle to artists I only kinda like, but if Drumm's going to keep doing collaboration tapes as favors to his friends, where all of his own input sounds completely usurped into the other's style, he needs to at least give his fans a new (solo!) masterpiece every once in a while.