Industrial is like that cousin who writes ‘Literature’: full of bands that think they are creating something that will touch the soul, but are really just sticking things together with glue sticks. Know How To Carry A Whip by Corrections House addresses this. By throwing it into a cell and beating the shit out of it.
Their brand of industrial is like shoving samples and electronic drops and rumbles into the middle of a blackened rock show, while the vocalist shouts obscenities straight into your sweating face. The riffs are jagged as broken glass, the samples are brutally low and demented, and the feedback and static cues are like dragging sandpaper across your speakers. In all, it touches the lizard brain to panic about nothing, and move to the ragged beat. This is rave music for the damned and unflinchingly fucked. The album also carries a very 80’s synth soundtrack sound from horror movies, and sources like Goblin, Wes Craven, and the like, as well as the new wave of soundtrack bands like Gatekeeper or Oscillotron. It’s a very heady sound for the slightly disturbed.
Considering the talent involved in this group, Scott Kelly of Neurosis/Scott Kelly solo, Mike WIlliams of Eyehategod, Sanford Parker of ex-Minsk/ex-Nachmystium, and Bruce Lamont of Yakuza/ex-Minsk (live), it’s absolutely no wonder this album just drives a spike into your nervous system. Mixing and production make it an amazingly beautiful sounding album, and the content titles make it very clear they want you to feel some persecution and violence from the record. THey want you to understand their punishing music, grinding it in with the ease of a baton tip held into the ribs.
Highlights are plentiful on this album, from the opener, Crossing My One Good Finger, with it’s huge, blasting sound that puts you in mind of an unstoppable ship bearing down on you, thrash worthy picking and garbage can drums stimulating that dark part of the soul to start prowling for trouble, to White Man’s Gonna Lose having that old 80’s synth sound, with William’s vocals just shredding out of the speakers. THe album is simply made to distress and claw its way into your brain. Hopeless Moronic gives us a slowly scintillating beat while Williams and a second party simply sandblast you with extreme vocal delivery, sending the mind reeling into a vortex of aggression and synthetic noise.
Pick up Corrections House’s Know How To Carry A Whip October 23rd, just in time to get in the spirit of All Hallow’s Eve!
Playlist for their prior album, Last City Vero:
