Review the Album "Cleansing" by American Thrash Band Prong

Prong is an industrial crossover thrash band from New York City. Their 1994 album Cleansing deserves a review not only because of the hit songs Snap Your Fingers, Snap Your Neck, Broken Peace, and Cut-Rate but because this is an album that has musical heaviness, attitude, and aggression which keeps listeners entertained for the most part. Tommy Victor who plays the guitar and handles all the vocal duties is Prong because without him, the band would not continue. In a sense, he is the main talent, driving force, and mastermind behind the success of Prong.

From the start of the album with the song "Another Worldly Device," you hear the heavy, rough hard hitting guitar sound that lets you know of the industrial nature of the guitars. The song ends with a shout from Tommy.

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Snap Your Fingers, Snap Your Neck may be the best song that Prong has written. The song was very popular and famous on MTV’s Headbangers Boll show in 1994. The song starts with a very effective and catchy bass line played by the late Paul Raven. The song is a sort of humorous attempt to mock those people that desire to have the good life. Even though these people work so hard to get to the best kind of social standing possible, in the end they become burned out and exhausted. Once again, there is a shouting part by Tommy Victor in the song but this is a sign that the band was really enthusiastic about the songwriting process and when there is that enthusiasm to create a song, the band ends up doing a great job. Broken Peace features a catchy vocal line by Tommy Victor as he says “pick up, pick up, pick up the broken pieces.” In short it is reasonable to conclude that five of the first six songs of Cleansing are pretty darn solid! Prong is one of those older American metal bands that can be considered to have been pretty good throughout their career.

For many years, this writer felt that Cleansing has five very good songs but the rest were either just average or terrible. Fast forward to 2017 and you will hear a slightly different opinion from me. For instance, the song "Out of This Misery" has a pretty good groove to it. Although the vocal shouting by Tommy repeats itself, the song is a good one in the second half of the album.

However, starting with the song called "No Question," Tommy’s voice becomes distorted and rough and the song suffers as a result of it. Next, there is the blues style song Not of this Earth which is basically referring to what human beings are doing on a planet that seems to have lost its ability to sustain itself. The song is trying to say that Earth is no longer comfortable for human life. "Home Rule" is a heavy song about what happens when countries engage in empire building as countries are taken over and the local population is often times scared into submission by the country that tries to occupy this land. One example is what Hernan Cortes did to Mexico. The last song called "Test" begins with the famous loud sound followed by the notification that a test of the emergency broadcasting system is going on.

Overall, Cleansing is a decent metal album that has five great songs, two good songs (Out of this Misery and Test) and five songs that are not very good. However because of a mostly very strong first half, Cleansing still ends up being a good album even for 1994.

Grade: 72 out of 100 points C