IAMX - Becoming X

When people think of Chris Corner, their minds usually go to Sneaker Pimps, the electro-pop/post-trip-hop band he founded himself in 1995 together with Liam Howe. We're in Hartlepool, on England's northeastern coast, where Corner grew up in a modest working-class family, surrounded by sisters and strong women who would shape his sensitivity as he grew up.

His time with the Pimps proved invaluable for his technical and performing development. It's from the ashes of that former band that Chris Corner's solo project is born, undoubtedly far more interesting, even if less immediately accessible than Sneaker Pimps' easy-going - though still enjoyable - rhythms. We're talking about the IAMX project (I am X), which first saw the light of day in 2004 with the EP Your Joy Is My Low, containing four tracks that already hint at the bipolar, vaguely noir mood he would go on to fully realize later. Even here, though, you can already sense a sensuality pushed to the extreme, free from social conventions and record-business constraints, in an expressive freedom that is, ultimately, the whole point of IAMX.

The track that best captures the key to Corner's sound on this first EP is "You Stick It In Me": the electronic element grows heavier and more jagged, coalescing at the point where it pushes too far into clearly industrial-tinged experimentation and the first sketches of dark-cabaret, which would later become a trademark of his style. There's an extremely thin falsetto that can recall a less flashy Bellamy. There's also a clear analysis of the world both within and outside himself, which comes as no surprise given that Corner describes himself as an obsessive observer. "It's like having an annoying buzz in my ears that I can't stop." A buzz that even leads him to think of death as a longing for liberation from the fractals of grim hypocrisy that dominate relationships between people, always and necessarily constructed ("I Like Pretending"), just as love is seen in its saddest and most desolate light on the splendid ballad "This Will Make You Love Again", a classic among fans.

An EP that amounts to a first sketch of the reborn Chris Corner's artistic statement, but one that still leans too heavily on electro ballads wracked by overt emotionality. A homogeneity that, in the long run, could grow tiresome. Even so, it's only a taste of what would become IAMX's debut album, Kiss + Swallow, whose title already amounts to a statement of intent. In the meantime, though, CC writes the soundtrack for the French film "Sky Fighters" ("Les Chevaliers Du Ciel") and collaborates on some tracks with his girlfriend Sue Denim of Robots In Disguise. But it's only a pleasant interlude - even if tracks like "Attack 61" cut a decent pop figure - before he throws himself headlong back into his IAMX project and the new album.

Needless to say, this is a record that reeks of sex in every nook and cranny, and the pale British electrowriter knows it well, so he doesn't hold back from stuffing the songs with pulsating sounds tailor-made for his slightly androgynous voice ("Sailor", "Mercy", "Heatwave"). But he never neglects the emotional element either ("Simple Girl"); indeed, the songs' build-up always has a touch of catharsis to it, without ever losing its club-oriented streak. Because IAMX's music is meant to be played in warehouses, pubs, small venues. There are no big concerts for IAMX. This is a band that needs to see its audience face to face, to dance with them, to share with them the same idea of artistic hedonism without time pressures or anything else. Anyone who has seen Chris Corner sing and play relentlessly, in his black clothes and dark-glam make-up, flanked by his trusty Janine Gezang and the rest of the band, knows this well. IAMX undoubtedly lives for its live dimension.

And it's in that dimension that you can really gauge the difference with similar artists, such as Placebo - with whom he nonetheless shares a kind of atmospheric weltanschauung - Noblesse Oblige, much more rooted in new wave, for whom Chris Corner himself directed the video for "Runaway", and, above all, Patrick Wolf. The latter is undoubtedly far more refined and, if you like, polished, as well as much more rooted in singer-songwriter territory; no less intriguing, but classier than IAMX, who cares little about - and indeed prides himself on - a rougher, rawer sound. Among other things, the similarities with the hugely talented werewolf only really start to show from IAMX's third album onwards, The Alternative, released in 2006, where Corner tries to push his sound a step forward.

He can't bring himself to think of his music as something complete in itself, or of a song as a finished work. That's why, time and again, he goes back to some of his old tracks, even ones recorded with Sneaker Pimps, and recomposes them, tears them apart only to reassemble them, violates them, injects them with his own murky, dark streak. On The Alternative, for instance, we get reworkings of "After Every Party I Die" and "This Will Make You Love Again", in which both tracks are literally stripped of their heavier trappings and loaded with a brand-new melancholy.

But this is the album where Chris Corner's compositional talent comes to light in all its pop beauty. Because, even though it's hard to pin down its genre with any precision, there's no doubt he's capable of writing extremely catchy songs, drowned in an electro-funk cauldron and, at times, synth-pop, as on the eloquent single "Spit It Out", whose video, shot in Berlin, also features the aforementioned Sue Denim of Robots In Disguise (sporting a look that feels very much like Lady Gaga ante-litteram). The dark-cabaret attitude mentioned earlier is also brought into focus on "President", a manifesto of IAMX's surreal politics and aesthetics. And, amid faint echoes of Gary Numan and Depeche Mode, the carnal, drugged tension typical of his sound is deepened further, reaching heights of exceptional musical and evocative power ("Nightlife", "The Alternative Sex", "Bring Me Back A Dog"), before washing up on the shores of pure melody with "S.H.E.". This album, The Alternative, marks the first real success of the IAMX project, which nonetheless still remains hidden from the mainstream audience, despite having a mainstream attitude in its own right.

In November 2008, a limited-edition live version of the album was released, Live In Warsaw, which captures the performance for Polskie Radio Program III, later remixed by Corner himself in his studios in Berlin - where he had meanwhile relocated - and finally released on his independent label, 61records.

In May of the following year, IAMX released its third album, The Kingdom Of Welcome Addiction, which carries on in the same vein as The Alternative and, where possible, lays it on even thicker. Case in point: the high-octane title track, which would put even the most hard-driving Muse to shame, the heart-wrenching big ballad "I'm terrified", the more-industrial-than-ever neuroses of "An I For An I", and the intensely poetic "Running", one of the most touching peaks of Corner's songwriting, matched only by its sibling "Quiet The Mind", which however dates from the most recent album. At least two other tracks stand out: first, the sensual, theatrical cabaret of "Tear Garden", accompanied by a video that's all purifying chiaroscuro, overlaid with images of Corner and the rest of the band in decidedly picturesque garb. The art of music marrying that of the visual. And then there's the unsettling "My Secret Friend", written and sung together with Imogen Heap, a British singer-songwriter of boundless grace, whose distinctive voice brings out even better what, according to Corner, is the song's meaning - namely giving life to these two people living out a romantic, and probably secret, incestuous and psychotic relationship. All of this is well represented in the video clip, directed by Chris Corner himself, in which he appears as a blonde woman and Imogen Heap wears a men's suit and glasses, the latter actually more convincing than her female counterpart. And in the background, those bleak, gloomy urban landscapes so dear to him.

On 19 March 2010, a fully remixed version of the album was released titled "Dogmatic Infidel Comedown Ok" (an anagram of "Kingdom Of Welcome Addiction"), featuring remixes by artists such as Alec Empire, Viva la Fete, Terence Fixmer, Combichrist, and Corner himself under the alias UNFALL.

In April 2010, IAMX announced, via its official Facebook and Twitter pages, the making and subsequent release of the fourth album, initially referred to as "IAMX4" and later retitled Volatile Times. And no title could have been better suited to an album that sets out to probe the fleeting nature of human form within the boundless and yet minuscule space we're allotted in the world, making us march over the jagged shards of broken bottles in a city reduced to dust by the crude ideas that dominate humanity. It's IAMX's most commercial album, but also its most complex; a kind of concept album brimming with ideas, more successful in some parts than others. There's an impenetrable, extraordinary flavor that wraps itself around the listener whenever IAMX's music comes to life, and on Volatile Times that feeling is more vivid than ever; a dark voluptuousness, capable of tearing the clothes right off you, yet it's almost dramatic. It has a pleasurably feverish, noirish aftertaste that's not without a comic-book quality to it. And Chris Corner plays with that. Oh, does he play with it! Just listen to the title track and watch its video, where he has fun playing a kind of strongly glamster Marilyn Manson, and then there are the usual contrasts, real key points of IAMX's aesthetic, which here grow even more turbulent, with soft choruses set against raspy, smoky vocal lines.

Outside influences are more noticeable here than elsewhere, though: on "Fire And Whispers" you can sense the unmistakable à-la Depeche Mode touch, on "Dance With Me" the ghost of Nine Inch Nails returns, having already made some fleeting appearances before, and "Into Asylum" at times brings to mind the chaotic Blur of "Blur" and "13", though in this latter case the resemblance, while it feels natural, is probably entirely coincidental. Because, deep down, this is exactly what drives IAMX's music: a thoroughly nineties reworking of the eighties sound. Plus the usual eccentric outliers, which in the case of Volatile Times are "Bernadette", a dark-burlesque episode occupying the same slot that "President" held on The Alternative, but reinterpreted in a stranger, more ambiguous way, and "Music People", which wallows in an intriguing, brimming sonic cocktail, right up to its mad closing acceleration.

Meanwhile, the IAMX project keeps working at full speed. The fan base has grown since the days of Kiss + Swallow, and Chris Corner spares them nothing: letters posted on the official site and sent by email to subscribers, as well as dedications, previews and photographs on the Facebook page and blog. CDs, merchandise and t-shirts are sold through Boutique IAMX, the band's independent official store. Everything seems designed to build empathy with that audience, who could only celebrate when IAMX's fifth album arrived in October 2012. The big new development for IAMX5, aka The Unified Field, is the co-production credit of Jim Abiss, who had already stood by Corner on Sneaker Pimps' debut album, "Becoming X", as well as working with other artists such as Mono, Adele, Editors and Ladytron. Perhaps that's why the sound of IAMX's latest effort has never been so crystalline. Even Corner's voice is purified of overly heavy sonic baggage, yet everything comes across full and enveloping, meticulously crafted amid a sea of glitches and synth touches (and in this respect, "Walk With Noise" seems to be the perfect example).

It's impossible not to notice the new light shining through this work, which reveals yet another facet of Chris Corner's creative sensibility: the quirky, cabaret-like swagger of "Animal Impulses", the flawless airiness of "Screams", and the memory of a love burned out under atomic skies on the semi-acoustic ballad "Under Atomic Skies" are among the most significant moments. The one real flaw of the whole record is precisely the title track, which finds him shifting from his typical electroclash sounds to a decidedly more dance-oriented register - though this doesn't undermine the quality of the song itself, which is in fact brilliantly written. The track's problem lies in feeling out of place among the rest, failing to blend into the album's overall mood. The other two singles fare better: the toxic ballad "Quiet The Mind", among CC's high points, and the bipolarity expressed through the dual language (English-German) of "I Come With Knives", bolstered by an unsettling yet irresistible nursery rhyme in German and by catchy electro-noise echoes we'd already heard on Volatile Times.

It seems clear, then, that if the IAMX project is ever destined to reach a mainstream audience, it will be with The Unified Field, which we can unreservedly call Chris Corner's coming-of-age record. Otherwise, so much the better for his circle of fans, who can keep enjoying his thoroughly modern, ever-evolving electro-dark verve, a genuine musical oxymoron.

Including the aforementioned instrumental work in the discography, with Alive In New Light we've reached number eight: had this been a debut album, we could have found better words to describe the nine tracks on the record, but overall the general level isn't entirely satisfying, considering the glorious heights reached by one of the most inspired artists of the new century in the alternative-electro field. Chris Corner keeps his class intact, but this time his talent reveals itself as a spark that shines without setting off a devastating explosion. The most beautiful light, after all, was the one that lit up the darkness; today Chris instead sings like this: "you dragged me through the darkest days, by the skin of my teeth you restored my fate, and I raised myself out of the ashes, now I'm alive in new light". A clear and straightforward message — we're happy for him, a little less so about this comeback, which only just scrapes a passing grade.

We had left Chris Corner, Janine Gezang and the other members of the IAMX project caught up in the electro-industrial neuroses of Machinate (2021). And it's precisely from there, and from another recent instrumental record by the band, Unfall (2017), that we need to start in order to understand their latest effort, Fault Lines¹ (2023). Here, in fact, IAMX's mythopoietic choices are put to the service of a vision that deconstructs and disintegrates – with deliberate ungraciousness – some of the interpretive schemes of the past, capturing a snapshot of their own artistic identity (X ID), still as puffed up as ever with a trivial, insolent self-indulgence that shuns rules and discipline.

It's no coincidence that in many of the album's tracks, Chris Corner's voice arches in a way that's markedly less supple and elegant than in the past, alternating between vocoder games and near-screamed registers that effectively convey that "psychotic shift" spelled out in the powerful title track. Vocal distortion is certainly a new and unsettling element that might stir the ire of many fans, but it can be read as an exegesis of the artist's existential unease. And we welcome Chris Corner's existential unease, which in some recent episodes ("Alive In The New Light") had been replaced by a damnably boring positive attitude.

The usual dark cabaret moments that IAMX had accustomed us to are missing, but not the industrial flourishes – present above all in the excellent "Thanatos" – nor the aching ballads such as "Radical Self Love", which seems to want to hook itself onto that "Metanoia" that represented the apex of IAMX's poetics, and the sensual "The Truth", in which sexual appetite becomes a metaphor for metaphysical cravings and vice versa. In "Disciple", which stands out for its catchiness, we venture into a BDSM tale steeped in possession, control, forgiveness and truth, whereas "In Bondage" gets lost in lyrics that – aside from the dark, obsessive "nothing changes but my blood flow" – seem to have been handed over to chatGPT.

The impression is that, for a couple of albums now, Chris Corner has been desperately trying to steer IAMX away from the mainstream chimera (which he had brushed up against back in 2013 with Volatile Times) in order to embrace once more the nocturnal, voluptuous, club-driven dimension that won over his earliest European fans — a move that will probably cost him many of the US followers who had instead fallen for the positive approach mentioned earlier, a direct consequence of the musician's move to Los Angeles. And so, in order to fully reclaim that sibylline mood, Corner can't rely on half measures or on the skillful, balanced blending of registers that he's proven countless times he knows how to handle; now he needs to overflow, scream, vomit pleasure and plunge us into a Hellraiser-like atmosphere, leaving us with a record that, between highs and lows, has an ambitious and divisive personality. Take it or leave it.

Contributions by Paolo Chemnitz ("Alive In New Light")

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