If you’ve seen Fellini’s La Strada, and witnessed both the beautiful freedom of the gypsy circus and the brutality of its everyday existence and dysfunctional relationships, you’ll understand IAMX’s latest album, Kingdom of Welcome Addiction. Just as Fellini demonstrates a love and compassion for humanity and its circuses, Chris Corner has proven his musical genius in a record that is cinematic in its musical poetry and evocative in its dissection of human flaws and relationships. Rather than stay with thumping, slinking dance anthems and cabaret-style provocation, Corner has progressed into much more personal and political territory, resulting in both a yearning for a collective, more romantic, past, but also an attempted, futile escape from a personal one. It is the sound of humans who can’t help themselves, going too far despite how it may harm the self and hurt others. It is the soundtrack for the aesthetic pleasure in damage and violence and the sweetness of being a mess.
You enter Corner’s realm via Nature of Inviting, a song that provides the perfect bridge between The Alternative and this record. A low, muddy bass beat pulses beneath creaking squeals and crisp snare, and Corner alternates between a seductive lower, dreamy register and a heart-fluttering falsetto before throwing himself into an anguished, strangled “I love you/I hate you” refrain. The push and pull of contradictory desires and their irresistible power infuse the track with sensuality and danger. Then the title track comes in with spiralling, flamenco before a dramatic pounding of a bass drum and sweeping orchestral presence. As a counterpoint to the theatric, Corner’s vocals become a tender whisper for the chorus: “If you chose life/You know what the fear is like/If you welcome addiction/This is your kingdom”; there’s strength in weakness here and a revelling in being broken, if only to feel and live more intensely than those who are more successful at holding themselves together. Shifting from the serious drama of the preceding song to the seeming lightness of a mincing rhythm, plinking keys and snapping fingers, Tear Garden immediately brings to mind the German word “Tiergarten,” meaning “zoo,” and also reminds me more specifically of the famous Berlin Tiergarten and Octave Mirbeau’s The Torture Garden simultaneously. I get a sense of the inescapability of the crueler side of human nature, the way we’re hardwired with a self-aware consciousness, but with no better self-control than the animals we supplant. Though Corner sings, “I do evil things and evil things return,” there’s relief and redemption in the chords and cadences of the chorus as it seesaws and sighs, dropping like the purifying salinity of tears.
Corner’s duet with Imogen Heap, My Secret Friend, is a moody meditation on what seems to be an intoxicatingly intense relationship with undertones of dysfunction. Their voices meld, intertwine and parallel each other so wonderfully that they evoke an almost familial intimacy or an enigmatic twinning consciousness. The song entices you with the beauty of a nightshade, menacing and disturbing you as much as it intrigues and attracts you. Corner becomes more politically explicit on An I For An I, which takes on organized religion and its tunnel vision leading to self-fulfilling apocalyptic prophecy. Between the screwy, seasick waltz feel and Corner’s distorted, desperate half-screams, it generates an all-consuming paranoia and a feverish brain reeling with the cruelties of the outside world. As Corner howls lines like “The anger and enclosure of desire” and “Humility and touch is in decline,” he creates a feeling of straining against iron chains until your ribs crack and your lungs collapse. While I love all the songs on this album, I particularly adore I Am Terrified, a lullaby-like song with a 3/4 time signature and gentle, cascading arpeggios. It surges with a crystalline brokeness and the fear of losing control of one’s own mind, or even attempting to comprehend the mystery of that consciousness that drives human motives like a skidding, rattling motorcycle down a dirt road. As Corner’s voice soars, the lyric that resonates the most with me is “I am terrified I think too much”; it’s self-awareness that catches in the throat like a deliciously bittersweet sob.
Free download single, Think of England, which preceded the album back in November, is an urgent, syncopated anthem of breaking free, but an underlying inability to completely escape the burning bridges behind you. Making a reference to the 19th-century practice of telling newly married women to just “lie back and think of England” when enduring sex with their husbands, the track expresses the impossibility of escaping your past while more specifically referring to Corner’s move from his home country to Berlin; the peace is always short-lived and “the poison stories just repeat themselves in a fucked-up mess.” More social commentary comes in The Stupid, The Proud, one of the most circus-like compositions with its gypsy acoustic guitar and dark, broad strokes that evoke the whirling farces and exaggerated gestures of harlequins and Pierrots in grainy black and white celluloid. Condemning the stupidity of crowds and the enduring human flaw of pride, Corner sings, “The armies of faithful/The killers of reason, the grief of the crowd/The stupid, the proud/They blow our houses down,” performing like a child clown full of fairy tale in spite of a streetwise cynicism.
Another track that really resonates with me is You Can Be Happy, which begins with middle eastern flourishes and adds a pumping, insistent rhythm. There is a vein of hope and compassion in this song as Corner reminds himself that despite the pressing stench of a horrific, unjust world, he can open himself for brief moments of happiness. The spoken vocal by Janine Gezang, which states “It’s a cruel world for small things/But with lies and luxuries/in the in-between you can be happy,” is fantastically cool detachment that plays off the passionate singing provided by Corner. The Great Shipwreck of Life is a heart-pumping track with some of the best lines on the album, including “Release cold gender bombs on colonial closet middle England” and “We light up the bars of the world with the decadent essence of innocence/Free but sharp.” It’s a celebration of our equality in fraility and the liberty in recognizing it, all against a brilliant melody; if we’re going to fall down, we’re going to take the world with us. The record concludes with Running, a spine-tingling piece about necessary, self-imposed solitude. A self-proclaimed atheist, Chris Corner has also stated that he still loves the sound of hymns, and Running is definitely a page from the hymnal of harsh realities. At the same time, it retains a romantic wistfulness that speaks to that spiritual thread of our DNA that gives us just enough belief to preserve us. The refrain of “I must always run the race on my own” breaks my heart while the slightly shuffling, hollow bouncing beat sounds like world-weary footsteps limping into the distance.
Finding the glamour in reality’s poverty, Corner has produced an impressive installment in his identity project, IAMX. I applaud his honesty and vulnerability in this album; Kingdom of Welcome Addiction is cathartic and edifying in its presentation of pain and pleasure. I feel the weight of Fellini’s post-war weariness and recovery in Corner’s music along with the magical realism of the circus and the empathy in the chaos. The IAMX musical persona is a combination of Zampano, Gelsomina and the Fool, foiled by their own inabilities to escape themselves and disentangle themselves from that which will harm them because those very things can also give them meaning and joy. Chris Corner unites us nomadic freaks who cannot find a home anywhere else, those of us who feel like we’re living on the fringes, full of anger and sorrow, naivete and laughter.
CONDEMNED TO ROCK 'N ROLL 
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