Chicago-based experimentalist Bruce Lamont — he of Corrections House, Yakuza, Bloodiest, and so on — will release his new solo album, Broken Limbs Excite No Pity, on March 23 via War Crime Recordings. There’s a trailer video posted.

Okay, so those are pretty much the basics. You can go ahead and expect those to be the only things in any way basic about the release. Lamont, whose contributions on sax vocals, guitar and a variety of other noisemaking implements have helped push releases from more bands than I can count to new levels of progressive accomplishment, is a deeply creative sonic explorer. I last saw him on stage in his hometown with Scott Kelly in 2015 (review here) and though that night and everything about that trip in general was weird as hell — ask me about it sometime — it was nonetheless incredible to see what he brought to even such an intimate, quiet setting in terms of sonic breadth.

The rundown of accomplishments that the PR wire tosses out below is formidable, and from the track descriptions it looks like Lamont‘s covering a pretty significant range on the release as a whole. I’d expect no less.

Art and details:

BRUCE LAMONT To Release Broken Limbs Excite No Pity Via War Crime Recordings This March; Album Teaser Posted

When BRUCE LAMONT released his first solo album, Feral Songs For The Epic Decline, seven years ago, he was best known as the leader of the psychedelic Chicago jazz-metal group Yakuza. Thus, that album’s morose, arty songs came as a radical departure, showing him to be just as comfortable constructing droning, Swans-like epics as exploding with industrial and black metal-inspired rage. In the six years since, his creative journey has taken him farther and farther afield. He’s part of electronic noise-dirge squad Corrections House, with Eyehategod’s Mike IX Williams, Neurosis’s Scott Kelly, and longtime creative partner Sanford Parker; the mind-melting jazz-prog-hardcore trio Brain Tentacles, with Keelhaul bassist Aaron Dallison and grind drummer par excellence Dave Witte, and dozens of other projects, large and small, collaborating with an ever-growing network of like minds.

Broken Limbs Excite No Pity, LAMONT’s second solo album, is in many ways a harsher experience than Feral Songs. Tracked in Chicago’s Minbal Studios with Sanford Parker behind the board, it’s a one-man show like its predecessor — LAMONT sings, harmonizing mournfully with himself, and plays saxophone, guitar, percussion, and electronics. Also like last time, it opens with an eleven-minute epic. “Excite No Pity” starts out featuring multiple crying saxophones and deep, almost Bill Laswell-esque bass drones, but is ultimately overtaken by searing electronic noise. “MacLean” warps an acoustic guitar melody with tape effects, to keep it from sounding too much like a Kansas song, while “Goodbye Electric Sunday” is a unique blend of spaghetti western soundtrack and beat poetry over an almost hip-hop groove. LAMONT uses his voice as an instrument almost as often as he uses it to put across his lyrics. On “Neither Spare Nor Dispose,” he wails and groans as loops of forcefully strummed acoustic guitar and rumbling percussion thunder past, and static washes over it all like a wave.

At its base, music is sound (noise, if you like) organized into patterns. And those sounds/noises don’t have to be pretty ones, as long as the patterns are compelling. BRUCE LAMONT understands this intuitively, and has demonstrated an ability to create hypnotic, ominous, emotionally resonant and even somehow transcendent arrangements of patterned sound. These aren’t “songs” like you hear on the radio. They’re literally sound art. This is an album you dunk your head in like a bucket of ice water, and when you pull it back out, you’re not the same person you were before. – Phil Freeman, 2018

Broken Limbs Excite No Pity will see release on CD, digital, and limited vinyl formats via War Crime Recordings on March 23rd.

Broken Limbs Excite No Pity Track Listing:
1. Excite No Pity
2. 8-9-3
3. MacLean
4. Goodbye Electric Sunday
5. Neither Spare Nor Dispose
6. The Crystal Effect
7. Moonlight And The Sea

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Bruce Lamont, Broken Limbs Excite No Pity album trailer

It had been a few days since I’d gone outside. Seriously. In Chicago for a work trip, I’d been holed up either at the conference I was in town for or the hotel immediately adjacent to it. Dinner had been ordered in three nights in a row, and I’d gone precisely nowhere since arriving in the city on Sunday. Not healthy. Not living right. In the end, it was the phone call from hotel security — checking on the wellness of the room’s occupant, since housekeeping hadn’t been allowed to clean in more than 48 hours — that shamed me into leaving to see Corrections House bandmates Scott Kelly (also Neurosis) and Bruce Lamont (also Yakuza and Bloodiest). Shame sometimes does the trick.

As it happened, they were playing a different hotel, the Chicago Athletic Association Hotel, in a space carved out as the “Drawing Room” and decorated in what I can only describe as man-bun living room chic; dimly lit (as the pictures I got will attest — god damn I need a new camera), all things made to look old and comfortable, leather-bound everything, like the Harvard club where people go to talk about how their new app is going to do away with various plights of inequality. “Gamechanging” modern design by making it look like a slavemaster’s parlor. I’m sure it was all very expensive. It looked very expensive. Strange setting for a show.

Not to say that with Misters Kelly and Lamont both playing solo sets — they shared a guitar — it should’ve been in a dive bar. The chair I sat in was perfectly comfortable. It was the second night of the Kelly/Lamont tour, which may or may not be taking the place of a full Corrections House run to support that group’s new album, Know How to Carry a Whip, out on Neurot Recordings, and the plan seemed to be in order: Lamont would play first, Kelly second, and then they’d play together. Not a method entirely dissimilar from the first time I saw Corrections House early in 2013 (review here), but obviously a different sonic context without Sanford Parker‘s beats — likely on his way to the West Coast with Buried at Sea — and without Mike Williams of Eyehategod‘s semi-spoken drug poetics. Worth it to say that nothing felt overly like it was missing once the show got started.

Part of that is probably thanks to Lamont‘s kitchen-sink experimental approach. Surrounded by his saxophone, clarinet, the guitar he was sharing with Kelly, at least two vocal mics and sundry other processors, pedals and effects, he was able to create a wash of droning noise all on his own. Lamont‘s solo album, 2011’s Feral Songs for the Epic Decline, was the basis for some of the performance, but much of what he did was manipulated, echoed, spaced out, and layered into something new. I know Bloodiest have a new full-length coming at the start of 2016 via Relapse, but if Lamont hasn’t considered recording a follow-up solo outing live and putting it out even in limited numbers through War Crime Recordings, his label co-owned by Sanford Parker, he probably should. Some of the most affecting moments came as he tilted his head back and let loose a soulful howl that reminded me of some of the spaciousness he was able to conjure in Yakuza, but the whole set was saturated with creativity and Lamont‘s sense of controlling the chaos was palpable.

The switch to bringing out Scott Kelly was done via an extended saxo-drone and a wave of the hand. Both mics were already set up, and so Kelly came out from the crowd and picked up the guitar. There were a couple songs he played I didn’t recognize — maybe new, maybe covers I couldn’t identify — but his meditative takes on the works of Townes van Zandt are always welcome. He did “Tecumseh Valley” early in the set, but the highlights were cuts from his 2012 Scott Kelly and the Road Home album, The Forgiven Ghost in Me (review here). I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t hoping for “The Field that Surrounds Me,” but “The Sun is Dreaming in the Soul” did just fine, and particularly following “The Ladder in My Blood” from 2008’s solo album, The Wake. “We Let the Hell Come” provided an intense finish to his solo portion — Kelly rocking back and forth behind the mic in a less neck-dislocating fashion than he might on stage with Neurosis, but definitely with a similar rhythmic sensibility — arriving at its title line after gravel-throated incantations for which he backed off the mic about a foot but that still came through clear in their intent and vision.

A similar wave brought Lamont back to the front. Together Kelly and Lamont offered renditions of Townes Van Zandt‘s “The Rake” and Neil Young‘s “Cortez the Killer,” before finishing off with the Corrections House track “Run through the Night,” taken from their 2013 debut, Last City Zero. Standing side-by-side, Kelly‘s guitar and Lamont‘s sax cast a Morricone-style spell over the room, a hard strum spacious with both adding vocals until Lamont, having layered backing “ooh”s, created a sufficient wash and apex that seemed to swell one voice at a time until appropriately consuming. The studio version of that song gets pretty noisy, but live, it was more melodic, and when Kelly got back on mic to whisper out the last few lines, the multi-layer barrage he cut through made it plain that nothing else would follow. They cut out together and the show was over with a quick plug for merch, which had been placed on a table behind them while they played.

It was raining outside when they were done, so I took a quick cab back to my temporary lair and tried to get a night’s sleep. No dice there, but I didn’t the least bit regret how the evening had been spent, whatever it took to get me out the door.

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As it happens, I’m slated to be in Chicago for work the night that Corrections House bandmates Scott Kelly (also Neurosis) and Bruce Lamont (also Yakuza) play the second night of their upcoming solo-set tours. I wouldn’t mind seeing Lamont in front of a hometown crowd, and I’d presume that with Corrections House‘s new album, Know How to Carry a Whip, newly released, a decent portion of what they play when they get together on stage will be drawn, one way or another, from that. Plus, it’s Chicago, so Sanford Parker might be there. Sounds like a good time to me.

Should probably see if I’m actually going to be there before I start solidifying plans, but either way, this one seems like a win:

Neurosis’ SCOTT KELLY And Yakuza’s BRUCE LAMONT Join Forces For November Tour Run

Neurosis’ SCOTT KELLY and Yakuza’s BRUCE LAMONT will join forces later this Fall for a special stretch of US live dates. Set to commence November 10th in Detroit, Michigan, the pair will traverse eleven cities, with the trek coming to a close on November 21st in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Both Kelly and Lamont will be performing material from their respective solo projects as well as tunes from CORRECTIONS HOUSE.

SCOTT KELLY/BRUCE LAMONT:
11/10/2015 Majestic Café – Detroit, MI
11/11/2015 Drawing Room @ The Chicago Athletic Club – Chicago, IL
11/12/2015 Double Happiness – Columbus, OH
11/13/2015 The Acheron – Brooklyn, NY
11/14/2015 Gorman Bros. Music – Syracuse, NY
11/15/2015 Middle East (upstairs) – Boston, MA
11/17/2015 Kung Fu Necktie (late show) – Philadelphia, PA
11/18/2015 Ottobar- Baltimore, MD
11/19/2015 The Funhouse – Jersey City, NJ
11/20/2015 Alternative Gallery – Allentown, PA
11/21/2015 Smiling Moose (late show) – Pittsburgh, PA

SCOTT KELLY (Neurosis, Corrections House) will deliver his signature hymns of pain, reflection and redemption with tracks off his solo outings — the bleakly atmospheric Spirit Bound Flesh and starkly minimalist The Wake as well as The Forgiven Ghost In Me album, released in 2012 under the moniker SCOTT KELLY AND THE ROAD HOME and tunes from the moving Songs Of Townes Van Zandt collection. With a sound that’s at once soulful, morose and healing few artists can manifest with such devout sincerity, when KELLY sits quietly, with his guitar, there’s rarely a dry eye in the room when he bows out at the end.

Multi-instrumentalist and vocal sorcerer BRUCE LAMONT (Yakuza, Corrections House, Led Zeppelin 2) has performed/collaborated with an array of artists throughout his storied career. On this run, Lamont will be performing versions of some of the material on his 2011-issued debut solo album Feral Songs For The Epic Decline as well as newer/unreleased material. As with his previous solo outings, LAMONT will be executing multiple instruments and a plethora of vocal styles, with an incredibly layered looping system that culminates into some of the most entrancing live solo artist work one could ask for.

In addition, both KELLY and LAMONT will unite each evening following their respective sets to deafen the masses with renditions of various CORRECTIONS HOUSE hymns. CORRECTIONS HOUSE – which features within its ranks KELLY, LAMONT, Sanford Parker (Buried At Sea), Mike IX Williams (Eyehategod) and recently institutionalized minister of propaganda, Seward Fairbury — unleashed their long-awaited sophomore full-length, Know How To Carry A Whip, TODAY via Neurot Recordings. A nine-track, forty-five-minute exercise in sonic indecency, the record was captured by Parker alongside Fairbury in a subterranean bunker complex in Vietnam and dispels a disconcerting air of danger, paranoia and looming defeat marked by an inexplicable sense of catharsis.

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Corrections House, Know How to Carry a Whip (2015)

Somebody’s Range Rover had broken down in the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, so the traffic getting across to the St. Vitus bar in Brooklyn was a cruelty. The Patient Mrs. had business elsewhere in the borough as well, so we carpooled and sat for about an hour, waiting, inching forward, honking, being honked at, staring at the billboards for Soylent Orange or whatever it was, waiting. Waiting. Mostly it was waiting.

I was still early to the show, though, which was the live debut of the supergroup (they need to come up with a new tag for “band made up of people known for being in other bands”) Corrections House, whose lineup reads like a list of influences. Mike Williams of Eyehategod on vocals, Scott Kelly of Neurosis on guitar, Yakuza‘s Bruce Lamont handling sax, backing vocals and noise, and producer/Nachtmystium member Sanford Parker — permanently linked to the largely unmatched crush of Buried at Sea in my mind — acting as warden behind a podium with the band’s logo draped on the front, his laptop, sampler, drum machine adding to the experimental edge and providing the rhythmic base of the material.

The concept for the show was pretty complex. Two bands were opening: noise trio York Factory Complaint and blackened noisemakers Theologian, both NY-native. After them, each of the members of Corrections House would come up for a brief 10-15 minutes of solo work, then, once they were pieced together on the stage, a Corrections House set would close out the night. It was a cool theory, and it felt even better to know that St. Vitus bar was the first time they were trying it out, but I guess my concern going into it was how they’d actually make it happen with each member doing something different, what the order would be and how many songs Corrections House, as a band, could possibly have.

Answer? Three or four songs. But it was a long road to get there. York Factory Complaint went on at about 10PM, so I knew right away it was going to be a pretty late night. All the gear was backlined behind and around the outfit — which lists itself as a four-piece so perhaps someone was missing — who sat and knelt on the floor of the stage in front of their vintage-looking manipulators, Moogs and whathaveyous. Their noise was, well, noise. As advertised. Screaming vocals gave some inkling of structure, but there wasn’t really a verse as such, just lines spit over harsh audio.

I guess that’s going to happen from time to time, and for what it was, I thought the presentation was cool and the ambience creative. I always wanted to start a noise project with equipment hooked up to giant walls with knobs on them that I could dress as a mad scientist in a labcoat and run from side of the stage to side of the stage turning like a fool. Of course, with neither the money for equipment nor a knack for working with oversized knobs, it’s resided in the pile of band ideas next to my one-man black metal band with no music because nothing sounds kvlt enough and my doom project with lyrics based solely on the themes of Final Fantasy games.

York Factory Complaint was much simpler in their approach, and Theologian likewise, though the Leech-led live trio — which included Fade Kainer of Batillus on, you guessed it, synth and noise — were a little more grounded, relatively speaking, and had a projector going behind and over them while they played. That didn’t do much to make the sounds any friendlier or more accessible, but the point was the experiment, and their complex wash of synth, effects-laden vocals and array of abrasive screeches felt all the more purposed for its bleakness of mood. A couple toms on the side of the stage manned by Matt Slagle provided human-driven thud when called upon, and Leech‘s voice became as much a part of the wash as anything else. I wondered how they’d serve as a lead-in for Corrections House, but with Sanford Parker up first crafting a noise barrage of his own, it made more sense than one might have expected.

Dressed as all the members of the band would be in a black button-down with Corrections House logo patches sown on the arms and a larger logo on the back, Parker set quickly to work laying a bed of industrial-style beats and noisy flourishes. Samples came and went muddled by the surrounding swell as Parker, lost in the rhythm, continued to construct the sound one element at a time, even picking up a mic and manipulating feedback from it. After a while, Lamont joined him on stage, picking up his baritone sax and running it through a pedal board of his own, soon doing the same with some vocalizations and even scratches on the microphone that ran along the border between experimental and obnoxious. It can be a fine line sometimes.

Williams appeared unceremoniously on the side of the stage, holding a notebook, and gradually, Parker and Lamont brought the noise down to a steady drone. This actually worked really well, because in his reading — Williams in addition to fronting Eyehategod has done spoken word for a while now and has a book of poems called Cancer as a Social Activity — he gripped the mic, yelled and often had space to pause for the sound behind him filling what would otherwise have been silence tempting people in the crowd to talk over him. I’ve been to that kind of gig before and it’s excruciating, but whatever else you can say about Williams, he’s charismatic like few others I’ve seen on a stage. Like a magnet for eyeballs.

His poems/writings ran through a litany of post-beat disaffection, navigating a gamut of vague imagery and all-too-specific chemically-added grit. It’s hard to critique a written work by hearing a reading, but his delivery could change in a line from tragic and solipsistic to engaging with smiled charm, and not without interrupting the flow of a piece, and that’s worthy of commending. As he read, Kelly made his way to the front and took up position at the side of the stage, fresh off two rare East Coast Neurosis gigs, in Philly and at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple for a weekender preceding the launch of this tour. Lamont and Parker were still up there as well, the former kneeling in front of his pedal board in attentive semi-meditation and the latter tucked away behind his podium.

Closing out his portion with an extended poem that was a series of purposefully ridiculous claims ended by the refrain “That’s what the obituary said,” and finally ending it with what he seemed to make his own concerning his many-storied history of drug abuse — there was some mention of “finally kicking the habit” — Williams then made way for Kelly to run through a couple songs. This turned out to be something of a side-step, since each of the preceding additions of personnel to the stage had added to the atmosphere of what would become Corrections House, whereas Kelly‘s material is more straightforward and more definitively solo. Even “The Sun is Dreaming in the Soul,” which featured a second guitar on last year’s The Forgiven Ghost in Me (review here), was wholly Kelly‘s own despite complementing ethereal backing vocals from Lamont. I’m not about to complain for getting to watch Scott Kelly play his solo material — that can only make a good night better — but it was a turn from the process of building Corrections House on the stage, since what he was playing as part of the band turned out to be heavier, darker and more fitting to the rhythmic pulsations of Parker‘s drum machine.

Once they were all there, again, Corrections House only had three, maybe four songs to play. The difference was it had already been about an hour, so it was more like an extended encore than a full set. I wasn’t about to complain. Aside from Kelly playing angrier and with more distortion, there wasn’t much about Corrections House that hadn’t already been revealed. A digital “leak” of their “Hoax the System” video had given some idea of what to expect, and the other material they played followed suit, once more leaning on the line between organic darkened heavy and industrial coldness. Williams spat fury with his characteristic nihilism, Lamont kept up with Parker in laying the foundation of noise, be it with his sax or mic or both, and where once there wasn’t one, an increasing swirl of chaos ensued. It was all I could do to realize how far we’d already come by the time Corrections House were into their second offering.

They wrapped with an extended take on “Hoax the System,” its insistent rhythm playing out steady as the final tide of feedback rolled over it and just about everything else, Williams seeming to hold on against the rush with repetitions of his last lyrics urging the title. It was nearly 1AM by the time they were done, and I knew The Patient Mrs. was waiting, so I was quick out the door of the St. Vitus bar and back down the block to where she’d parked and was waiting for me to drive back to Jersey. Fortunately, whoever’s Range Rover it was had been towed by then. Small favors.

Pretty much the whole way through, this show wasn’t what I’d expected or planned on. From the traffic getting there to Williams taking the frontman spot then relinquishing for Kelly only to resume it shortly thereafter, to Lamont‘s mic-scratching, to the clear-road record time I made to the valley afterwards, the vast majority of my preconceived notions of what Corrections House would be had turned out to be in need of — forgive me — correcting. That’s what they got, anyhow. Rumor has it a 7″ is in the works, after that, who knows. But whatever might come next for these guys in this collaborative form, at least now I know why I’m anticipating it.

Extra pics after the jump.

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