The second release on Feeding Tube’s Unknown Province sublabel arrives not with a polite knock but with a bellow: the first‑ever reissue of Delusions, the self‑released 1988 LP by Montreal cult figure Corpusse. Long whispered about in Canadian underground circles and barely known anywhere else, Delusions has lived for decades as a private‑press talisman - a record you heard rumours of before you ever saw a copy. Corpusse, the self‑anointed “Canadian King of Rock N Roll,” was still a teenager in the Park‑Ex neighbourhood when he cut these tracks, serious enough about the mission to quit high school in order to record his debut and never look back.
The back‑cover photo tells its own story: a bald, bearded kid standing atop a filthy back‑alley snowbank, Montreal’s grey slush and brick pressing in behind him. That image is the visual echo of the music inside. Across eleven pieces - from “Prelude Into Disaster” and “Let Me Outta Here” to “Mansion Of Dreams,” “Parade of Freaks” and “Unspeakable Pressure” - Corpusse delivers a series of gothic mini‑dramas that toe the line between Shakespearean monologue and GG Allin rant. His vocals veer from cavernous baritone declamation to strangled screams and deranged croon, the lyrics tumbling out like apocalyptic street sermons, love letters and threats written in the same ink. It’s cathartic, often unhinged stuff; what might read as camp on paper becomes, on vinyl, something far more exposed and disquieting.
Beneath the voice, the instrumentation is brutally simple and strangely lush. Corpusse builds his sound on a Korg Poly‑6 (“best fucking synth ever,” as he still insists) and a Welson organ, battered into service as a one‑man backing band. Chords arrive as thick, minor‑key slabs, bass notes lunge and recede, cheap drum‑machine patterns (when they appear at all) hit like haunted heartbeat rather than dancefloor bait. In hindsight, someone might call it dungeon synth, but this is 1988: the reference points are more like burned‑out late‑’70s punk, decaying arena rock and outsider industrial, all melted down into a kind of homemade, low‑budget grand guignol. The city on the cover - decrepit, burned out, rendered as a delusional gothic skyline by Corpusse’s hand - is the world these songs inhabit, widely understood by contemporaries as a metaphor for Montreal’s own “gotham” mood at the time.
Alex Moskos’ liner notes place Delusions in a “holy trinity” of self‑released Montreal LPs from the 1980s, alongside Carlyle Williams’ Gotta Go For It and The American Devices’ Decensortized. What links them is not genre but attitude: brain‑fried, maverick visions of rock & roll that wander so far from consensus reality they sometimes border on psychosis. In that company, Delusions stands out even now for the sheer extremity of its emotional weather. There is no band dynamic to diffuse or soften things; every second is pure Corpusse, front to back, from the way he rides a single organ chord far past its natural expiration point to the abrupt, sometimes shocking endings that feel less like songs concluding than like tapes being cut off mid‑episode.
