If you translate the rhythm-melody-tonal color Venn diagram of music into the vast rock universe, the result is riff-melody-abstraction.

Within the nexus of that trinity Prisonshake resides, where both the visceral and the sublime can get nasty with each other, where the composed and the improvised meet, a blending of craft and abandon, where seemingly disparate rock dialects are resolved into a polyglot tongue with a Cleveland accent. An odyssey of donk.

The last Prisonshake full-length, The Roaring Third, was issued at the end of 1993, and Dirty Moons’ recordings date from 1995 to 2007, with some dead years in there. The idea of recording the album over multiple sessions in different locations and circumstances was integral to the conception of Dirty Moons, but a stretch of time this wide was not expected. It didn’t seem like a long time until a few years added up to five, and then? Disillusion. The challenge that had been set revealed itself to be greater than expected.

Prisonshake began in 1986 out of the ashes of the early 80s hardcore punk scene in Cleveland. Guitarist Robert Griffin and drummer Scott Pickering had played together in Spike in Vain and shortly afterwards got together to record what would be Prisonshake’s first demo. One year later, with engineer/producer Chris Burgess filling the bass slot, the trio released the first single, “Fairfield Avenue Serenade” in May 1987 and began performing regularly throughout the region, with Doug Enkler signing on as principal vocalist just a few months later.

From 1987 to 1992 the band released a dozen singles, EPs, and several “albums” on Griffin’s Scat label, Australia’s Rubber (who are also releasing DM), and a few other labels, as well as touring the US twice. After Burgess and Pickering’s departure, the core duo of Enkler and Griffin spent the next two years assembling various lineups to record and support what they consider to be their “real” first album, The Roaring Third, though some insist it is chronologically second, third, or fourth.

Enkler and Griffin moved to St. Louis in 1995 and were joined by Steve Scariano on bass and Ann Hirschfeld on drums. Ann did not last long, but she is present on DM’s 13-minute “Scissors Suite,” even turning in a lead vocal in one section. Patrick Hawley joined on drums a few months later, and the Enkler-Griffin-Scariano-Hawley lineup has now endured for 12 years, though it has done so almost completely outside the public eye. This exile also dovetailed with the Dirty Moons concept, as isolation allowed the individuality of the players’ musical voices to become more free and expressive. It also appealed to Griffin’s love of archetype – just as in monomyth, the principals left the known, journeyed to a strange new land, had adventures, some fortunate, some not, struggled to find that which was lost, and have now rejoined the world with the prize in hand.