Carbon Records
CR303
Prophecy finds Eye in form familiar to those who've had the good fortune to hear their 2016 album Other Sky, but even more compacted and condensed, a band simmered and reduced to their pure essence. And then the volume increases. Prophecy is a pummeling din of guitar clouds shot through with electronic disruption. Stapleton's relentless motion drives Porteous' icy guitar streams in leaping waves. 'Catch Them' opens the album with Peter's vocals, croaking out from the synth-lit shade – as far as I'm aware only the second time we've heard Stapleton deliver his own lyrics (the other being 'The Moon In Your Eyes' on Other Sky). After spending forty years as one of New Zealand's most distinctive lyricists - his visions of the gothic south, the Canterbury plains alive with soft menace in the moth lights eerie glow. His lyrics were a foundational element of the unclassifiable Xpressway stable legends The Terminals (of which Peter was a founding member). To finally hear Stapleton's lyrical vision at length over two albums directly from the horse's mouth is a revelation.
The entirety of the second side of Prophecy is given over to 'Nacred' which in its unyielding, pounding aggression resembles the grey downtown guitar of Sonic Youth circa 83, as if 'Sonic Death' was extended by the most lightning-struck incarnation of the Blue Humans. This is a side of Eye previously hinted at but never truly revealed until now. The two Peters lock into each other. A heaving morass of raging rockist noise which one hesitates to call 'minimalist' even as it searches for what more it could possibly leave unsaid in its oceanic roar. A dense ball of pure unbridled roar coated with Chapman's synth darting like sleek fishes on the surface of the sun. Unbelievably, Prophecy even features a cover: Eye present a radical turning inside-out of Dadamah's classic 'Too Hot To Dry' – Peter's smoldering claustrophobia offers a stark contrast to Kim Pieters’ wide open desert-sky delivery on This Is Not A Dream.
