Review Summary: It's a Pandora's box of pleasant (rather than evil) surprises. Well worth the money to buy it and multiple listens.
Eight may be the lucky number for nu-metal pioneer Korn. Two years after its seventh release and minus two band members, the group burst back into the rock spotlight with its eighth studio album. The record was released July 31 and made its debut at No. 2 on the Billboard charts. The follow-up to 2005’s See You On the Other Side carries no title, but lead singer Jonathan Davis made it clear he doesn’t want everyone labeling it blandly as “Untitled.”
“It’s not called ‘Untitled,’ but that’s what everyone’s calling it. We didn’t want to put a title on the record. We wanted the press and fans to come up with a name,” Davis said in an interview with Real Detroit Weekly.
Korn II, 8, Korn 2007, Untitled, Crap - whatever the listener’s designation, it’s absolutely Korn’s best album in years. It’s like the band took the best parts of each of its previous albums, added a few new dancehall twists, and turned the musical blender on frappe. Perhaps the absence of a title, as with the self-titled debut, is symbolic of a band’s journey come full-circle – one also signified by the end of Korn’s contract with Virgin Records.
Davis told Real Detroit Weekly that the main inspiration for the latest effort came from a near death experience last year.
“When I was in Europe I came down with a blood disorder called ITP, and thinking I was going to die, made me rearrange my priorities in life, and think about what’s really important. It kept going through my head, me dying and my sons not being able to have a dad to grow up with, s*** drove me crazy. I really pooled from that experience to write a lot of the lyrics.”
This can be heard on second track “Starting Over,” a head nod to his battles with the blood disease and alcohol and drug addiction. The song features distortion galore and Davis’ trademark wail and sounds like it could have been taken straight from his contribution to the “Queen of the Damned” soundtrack. Personnel losses resulting from guitarist Brian “Head” Welch’s departure after a “spiritual awakening” and drummer David Silveria’s hiatus to spend time with family have taken the band down to three of its original members: Davis, bassist Reginald “Fieldy” Arvizu and guitarist James “Munky” Shaffer.
It happens to every decade-old band that has multiple albums. Over the span of years and albums, the sound either or stays relatively the same throughout the course of the records (like with Sevendust’s consistent pounding metal aggression from its self-titled debut to most recent release Alpha) or evolves exponentially (as with Incubus’ spastic messy Cali-punk/funk in Fungus Amongus to the settled-down rhythmic alterna-pop of Light Grenades). Korn’s case has obviously been the latter – a case of spectrum-spanning sound change.
Korn fans who have followed the band from the start would probably argue that each consecutive effort gets less noteworthy, with the debut self-titled album and follow-up Life is Peachy being the best from the group. However, you can label the group’s music nu-metal, you can label it rap-rock…whatever genre you stick it with, it’s evident that Davis’ heart and soul went into this project. At this point, the commercialization of band can’t help but leak into the music, but this time around, the end result is…well, delightful, for a change.
Virtually every song on the album has a distinctly different sound. Now, whether this is a bad thing or a good thing is somewhat hard to determine. Some songs speak volumes lyrically and instrumentally (“Do What They Say,” “Hold On” and “Love and Luxury”), while a couple seem to fall through the cracks (“Ever Be” and “Innocent Bystander”). However, the more one listens to it, the more the album grows on the persistent peruser. With each subsequent listen, new and complicated musical layers are revealed.
Korn returns to the experimental electronica roots first heard on Issues and Untouchables, mostly a result of the contributions of keyboardist Zac Baird and Zappa drummer Terry Bozzio. However, the effects are played in less of an overkill than they have been in songs on past records. Arguably, it takes some degree of genius to fuse gloom-and-doom metal overtones with industrial dance beats without losing the credibility of the music. With some help from producer Atticus Ross, best known for working on projects with Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor, the band manages to do just that on this release.
The album’s first single, “Evolution,” is Davis’ wailing rant on the politically- and socially-charged subjects of war and global warming.
"It's about how us as human beings haven't evolved in the thousands of years we've been around," Davis told Billboard.com. "We're no different than monkeys. We're territorial and we fight, and we're destroying our planet. Why haven't we evolved? True human beings wouldn't be destroying each other and blowing s*** up. They'd be compassionate and they'd love one another and there'd be no violence."
The album intro sounds like the haunting opening (or end-credit closing, for that matter) to a carnival-like “abandon hope, all ye who enter here” horror film. Davis lets his humorous side shine through (and he does have one – after all, this is the guy who named two of his children Pirate and Zeppelin), on the ninth track, “Love and Luxury” maniacally laughing amid lyrics “you need a reason to believe, a reason to deceive, a reason for the song you’re singing/when everything you do makes perfect sense to you/so why is your alarm bell ringing?”. “Bitch We Got a Problem” is this album’s sister song to “Y’all Want a Single” from sixth album Take a Look in the Mirror. Despite a misleading, almost thuggish title, “Bitch” is actually an ode to schizophrenia (“Which one, which one of you is into me? Which one, which one of me is into you? We’re all schizophrenic, I fear/say how many voices you hear”). Heavy, slow and melancholy “Kiss” has Davis wondering “why you always push me away” and sounds almost like it could have been influenced by his half brother Mark Chavez’s former band, Adema. Punchy, coordinated guitar riffs and drum beats on “Killing” pause just long enough for Davis to indulge his death metal side with an incoherent, babbling scat interlude set against ominous, heavier-than-heavy guitars. Conversely, the following track and the best song on the album, “Hushabye” tones the tempo and mood down with a melancholy-but-clippy heart-on-sleeve lost love confession. As for the days of lead singer Jon Davis’ famed bagpipe interludes – well, they’re pretty much kilt-covered history. Well, almost - last song “I Will Protect You” features a minimal subdued electronic bagpipe intro.
This is a band whose originality has sparked either outright love or blind hatred in the minds and ears of reviewers and music lovers everywhere, and the mixed reviews for this latest album substantiate nothing less. Entertainment Weekly praised this album as being the band’s best release since 1999’s Issues, while a reviewer for Rolling Stone asserted that Korn sounds “wounded and diminished” and that this album “sounds like the final aria - the death scene.” However, Korn’s new effort sounds more like a blissful awakening to me – one marked by a band’s triumphant attempt to slip into its comfort zone without worrying what everyone else thinks
