IAMX - Kingdom of Welcome Addiction
By Nick Manteris · 0 Comments · Leave a Comment
Becoming X, the first album from the British trip-hop group Sneaker Pimps, featured Kelli Dayton on vocals (she now releases music under the name Kelli Ali), but the subsequent two albums went in a darker direction and founding member Chris Corner took over the singing duties. When their record label rejected the fourth album, Corner took some of those songs and used them to fuel a new solo project: IAMX. The new name came with a darker style of (almost industrial) synthpop that moved even further away from the original trip-hop sound.
Kingdom of Welcome Addiction is the third album from IAMX and it’s the strongest material that Chris Corner has ever released under this moniker. The disc starts with two powerful songs, “Nature of Inviting” and “Kingdom of Welcome Addiction,” and then on “My Secret Friend” an immediately recognizable Imogen Heap provides backing vocals. “I Am Terrified” slowly builds and builds into an imposing wall of horns and strings and “Think of England” is a play on a popular British expression that seems to imply that Berlin is a much better place to call home than England ever was. “You Can Be Happy” is a uncharacteristically upbeat song with a female chant that says, “It's a cruel world for small things / but with lies and luxuries / in the in-between / you can be happy.” The last great song on the album is “The Great Shipwreck of Life,” which is easy to sympathize with because “we all fall down.”
- Score
- 81%
IAMX gets better with every release and Kingdom of Welcome Addiction is easily one of the top ten albums so far in 2009.
