The collaborators who comprise Corrections House each come with an impressive pedigree: Mike IX Williams of Eyehategod and Scott Kelly of Neurosis are joined by Bruce Lamont (Yakuza), Sanford Parker (Minsk) and their appointed ‘minister of propaganda’, Seward Fairbury. Unlike many so-called supergeroups, Corrections House aren’t about egos but the coming together of powerful musical forces, and they’ve produced an album worthy of their combined talents. Naturally, this means ‘Last City Zero’ is an intense and often unsettling experience.
The quiet, contained oscillating intro to ‘Serve or Survive’ is soon buried beneath a welter of guitars and a distorted vocal that spits pure venom. More surprising is the groove of the rhythm, half industrial, half disco. If anything, it adds to the impact. From thereon in, ‘Last City Zero’ is an apocalyptically bleak and brutal assault. It’s not about pace, but weight and density.
The acoustic ‘Run Through the Night’ and located in the middle of the album, appears to offer a welcome change of tempo and tone, and shows a world-worn humanity. But this moment of softness is devastated as a tide of noise rises to obliterate the mood. The spoken word title track provides a bleak surveillance of the modern world, a society in physical and moral ruin, a scene of decay and destruction, of decrepitation and collapse, ‘where disposal of the body is nine tenths of the law’.
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The album’s harrowing journey concludes with the 9-minute industrial grind of ‘Drapes Hung by Jesus’. It’s the sonic recreation of a year in purgatory. It ain’t pretty – in fact, ‘Last City Zero’ is an ugly beast with serrated edges and a dark, dark heart. An album of our times, for certain, and an album that screams into the abyss while dissecting the pain of the age while tearing into the core of the human soul. Painful, certainly, and unrepentant in its absolute nihilism, but completely, unstintingly necessary.
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