BRUCE LAMONT – album stream
- by Andrea Chirulescu
- Posted on 23-03-2018
-Track premiere-
BRUCE LAMONT
The Release Date
May 30th, 2018
(War Crime Records (US) and My Proud Mountain (GAS))
In advance of its release, Revolver hosted the visual accompaniment to “Goodbye Electric Sunday,” starring Jason Balla of Ne-Hi. Elaborates LAMONT of the alluring clip, “The video was shot by Chicago filmmaker Jess Price who has also videos for Joan Of Arc, Oshwa, etc. It stars Chicago musician Jason Balla (Ne-Hi, Earring) as he roams the streets in the middle of the night perhaps being followed or looking for a masked figure we like to call ‘Terry.’
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 11-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.