Two years ago, Neurosis founder Scott Kelly, Eyehategod frontman Mike IX Williams, producer Sanford Parker, and underground metal's most prominent saxophonist Bruce Lamont formed Corrections House, a sort of supergroup that turned out to be defined as much by its intentionally haphazard improv streak as its members' heavy reputations. The music they produced combined easy-to-predict elements—like Kelly's churning, doomy guitars and Williams' Burroughsian spoken-word rant-poems—with surprising ones, like the industrial streak provided by Parker's electronic beats.
Despite its seat-of-the-pants beginnings, the group's found equilibrium, and on their second studio album, they're chasing down new ideas with a new confidence. Know How to Carry a Whip brings the electro-industrial elements to the forefront and also pushes into their most unexpected terrain yet—songs with distinct pop structures and even catchy melodies.
While it isn't going to spoil the group's esoteric reputation, Whip's a record that you could feel comfortable passing along to casual heavy music fans. In its first half, the album has headbangable beats, grinding Sabbath-y guitars, and actual hooks. The opener, "Crossing My One Good Finger", might be the catchiest cut any member of the band has ever been involved with, with Neubauten-inspired drums, thunderous guitars, and a fist-pumping chorus (even if the lyrics seem to be about suffocating on toxic fumes). You could actually dance to "White Man's Gonna Lose", as long as Williams' unhinged nihilism doesn't crush your buzz.
All of the catchy and danceable parts are covered in layers of sonic grime, expertly rendered by Parker, one of the world's leading experts at making records sound really bad in a really good way. They are also shot through with the searing misery that only Williams can really bring to a song. As a group, they remain obsessed with destruction and decay; fans looking for more of the nightmare poetry readings that defined Last City Zero should be perversely pleased by tracks like "I Was Never Good at Meth" that frame Williams' feverish, imagistic stanzas in washes of junkyard noise.
Last City Zero positioned Corrections House as one of the more interesting participants in the industrial music resurgence, and Know How to Carry a Whip places them in the lead. Feral and unrelentingly hostile, it's a ragged-edged, rusty shank plunged deep into the ribs of the modern day. Anyone whose formative years as a music fan involved Skinny Puppy or the Wax Trax! label at its peak will feel right at home.
