Home Read Albums Of The Week: Prison | Downstate

Albums Of The Week: Prison | Downstate

THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Ready to go back? Prison are still out there, breaking rocks in the haze and rumbling in the heat, just waiting for you to come around.

Prison have been active since 2015, but if you didn’t catch ’em live in N.Y.C., then you didn’t know — until late in the summer of ’23, when Upstate dropped. THEN you knew! Prison hit HARD, with jams so long and varied, they hadta have two titles each and the album was only four songs long, one per side. Yeah, Upstate was heavy, but always the fun kind, you know? And there are so many other kinds of heavy yet to be…

Downstate, the second official Prison stint, shows ya some, stretching to insane new places while pumping out MORE of some of the toughest jams around. Leap-hogging from one vibe to the next, Prison cop a variety of grooves, from minimalist (like Guru Guru) to sweat-shaking (Stooges) and chaotic (No Trend) — it feels like they’re coming from everywhere! They switched it up in almost every way they could this time. But that’s just Prison being Prison.

At its core, Prison are a multi-headed beast, and Downstate is built to showcase their swarming freakscene. Recording this one in Rockaway meant they could get Prison family and friends to drop in. Going Downstate with core Prisoners Sarim Al-Rawi, Matt Lilly and Paul Major are guitarists Marc Razo and Adam Reich, bassist Matt Leibowitz and Dave Smoota Smith on trombone (his first time in Prison!).

Also present is the late, lamented Sam Jayne, a fellow lifer whose spirit will act as a guide for the rest of Prison’s time. All he brought to the session was a bottle of tequila. He just wanted to jam — and on all borrowed shit too. He didn’t care.

With these many hands on deck, Prison play all kinds of things, from insane distorted rock to dreamy psychedelia, plus some jazzy and gutsy blues shit too. They got some of the lighter side of Prison in there, of course — in addition to screaming and slamming, you gotta laugh! It was all recorded in a day, with a couple overdubs, but it took a while to get the mixes right. There were a lot of moments that they didn’t know would lead to anything, but when listening back later, then they heard where they were going. All that had to get in there somehow. Plus, they had to get the drums and the reverb right!

Another level to the sound on Downstate is in the hard cuts and savvy fades in the edit (like Live-Evil!). Lilly sequenced the mixes at home using two CDJs fed into a Numark DJ deck and dubbed down live to cassette, then they sent the tape to engineer Matt Walsh to duplicate timings and fades and all that. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by critical mass while you’re listening, this could be why! It’s for sure part of what makes these 43 minutes of time give anyone who listens an entire night’s worth of dreams! Like trapdoors taking you from where you thought you were standing to someplace entirely different, wondering if what just happened was 10 seconds or one million years long. And if you still don’t know — man, it was both!

Next up? The Central Park Bandshell? Prison plays prison? Who knows? The sky’s the limit. But before all that, you gotta make it back from Downstate. They don’t make it easy…”