All Hope Is Gone
Slipknot: All Hope Is Gone
I managed to get a little sneak(y) peek at the new album. (Dear RIAA, I am buying the album in two days with my friend Christina, who is similarly obsessed. So stuff it.)
I was in the throes of excitement at the first new Slipknot album in four years, coupled with the dread I sometimes feel when scanning excerpts of their new "political" lyrics. When coming to this album, it is important to throw off your past assumptions of Slipknot, to acknowledge that just as you change, so does everyone else - and ultimately there are nine ever-changing people behind these AWESOME masks. (Pictured above is the new incarnation of Joey Jordison, drummer extraordinaire.)
I came to Slipknot in my freshman year of high school, a few months after Vol. 3: The Subliminal Verses hit the shelves. I was angsty, disillusioned, but not unintelligent. And I yearned for more than mere shits and fucks could provide. This album suited me well. It was the first of their discography that did not have an "explicit content" sticker on the front. (I had issues buying the first two albums at Best Buy and had to rope my uncle into doing it for me. Love ya, Unc.) Corey, who had been accused of relying too heavily on curse words to populate his angry lyrics, made a distinct shift from form and started using "polysyllabic" and "omnipresent" more often than lovely turns of phrase like "fuck this shit." I thought this was the height of cool.
All Hope Is Gone by and large retains this formula, but the lyrics testify to a more political and self-aware Corey who seeks a belief in something. He's no longer "the idiot... too fucked to beg and not afraid to care" but has channeled his rage into something productive ("I would rather fight than let another die / We're the problem but we're also the solution"). It's different, yeah, and I didn't warm up to it right away, but it's nice to see him bitching about something of substance if he indeed has to bitch. On most of the songs, the metal and the drums have become more suffocating than ever - "Gematria" makes eardrums rattle as Corey screams, "What if God doesn't care?" and songs like "This Cold Black" and "Vendetta" make an immediate impression of "ouch!" (Don't worry, this is a very good thing.)
There are a few missteps, though. In the vein of Vol. 3's "Circle" and "Vermilion Pt. 2," Corey has given us "Dead Memories" (louder) and "Snuff" (quieter), which, while they are well-placed to lighten up the intensity of "Psychosocial" and "Wherein Lies Continue," never quite reach their potential and end up falling short of the standard the previous album set. These songs may grow on diehard Slipknot fans after a few weeks of listening, but most will brush them off like interfering flies. As for "execute," it sounds like "742617000027" mated with an angry Martin Luther King, Jr. speech, but ends up sounding pretty cool - especially when the guitar kicks in and Corey says, "You rage for no reason because you have no reason."
All in all, we've heard that this album sounds like a dark mix of their previous two albums, and that's about as accurate as you can get. It has a lot of Vol. 3's controlled sense of purpose and anger, conventional song structures, and a couple melodic outings, with the heavy, multilayered metal and reckless abandon of Iowa. I would say it's an improvement upon the last release insofar as the lyrics are at some points very smartly resonant of the real world we live in, instead of insecurity and self-loathing wrapped in words that give you the mental image of Corey flipping through a thesaurus with words like "fuck" and "goddamn" under a column listed "DO NOT USE." He no longer screams like he's transforming into a werewolf, but this album marks the scream of someone who did not vote for Bush in 2004, and is still super pissed about his reelection.
I managed to get a little sneak(y) peek at the new album. (Dear RIAA, I am buying the album in two days with my friend Christina, who is similarly obsessed. So stuff it.)
I was in the throes of excitement at the first new Slipknot album in four years, coupled with the dread I sometimes feel when scanning excerpts of their new "political" lyrics. When coming to this album, it is important to throw off your past assumptions of Slipknot, to acknowledge that just as you change, so does everyone else - and ultimately there are nine ever-changing people behind these AWESOME masks. (Pictured above is the new incarnation of Joey Jordison, drummer extraordinaire.)
I came to Slipknot in my freshman year of high school, a few months after Vol. 3: The Subliminal Verses hit the shelves. I was angsty, disillusioned, but not unintelligent. And I yearned for more than mere shits and fucks could provide. This album suited me well. It was the first of their discography that did not have an "explicit content" sticker on the front. (I had issues buying the first two albums at Best Buy and had to rope my uncle into doing it for me. Love ya, Unc.) Corey, who had been accused of relying too heavily on curse words to populate his angry lyrics, made a distinct shift from form and started using "polysyllabic" and "omnipresent" more often than lovely turns of phrase like "fuck this shit." I thought this was the height of cool.
All Hope Is Gone by and large retains this formula, but the lyrics testify to a more political and self-aware Corey who seeks a belief in something. He's no longer "the idiot... too fucked to beg and not afraid to care" but has channeled his rage into something productive ("I would rather fight than let another die / We're the problem but we're also the solution"). It's different, yeah, and I didn't warm up to it right away, but it's nice to see him bitching about something of substance if he indeed has to bitch. On most of the songs, the metal and the drums have become more suffocating than ever - "Gematria" makes eardrums rattle as Corey screams, "What if God doesn't care?" and songs like "This Cold Black" and "Vendetta" make an immediate impression of "ouch!" (Don't worry, this is a very good thing.)
There are a few missteps, though. In the vein of Vol. 3's "Circle" and "Vermilion Pt. 2," Corey has given us "Dead Memories" (louder) and "Snuff" (quieter), which, while they are well-placed to lighten up the intensity of "Psychosocial" and "Wherein Lies Continue," never quite reach their potential and end up falling short of the standard the previous album set. These songs may grow on diehard Slipknot fans after a few weeks of listening, but most will brush them off like interfering flies. As for "execute," it sounds like "742617000027" mated with an angry Martin Luther King, Jr. speech, but ends up sounding pretty cool - especially when the guitar kicks in and Corey says, "You rage for no reason because you have no reason."
All in all, we've heard that this album sounds like a dark mix of their previous two albums, and that's about as accurate as you can get. It has a lot of Vol. 3's controlled sense of purpose and anger, conventional song structures, and a couple melodic outings, with the heavy, multilayered metal and reckless abandon of Iowa. I would say it's an improvement upon the last release insofar as the lyrics are at some points very smartly resonant of the real world we live in, instead of insecurity and self-loathing wrapped in words that give you the mental image of Corey flipping through a thesaurus with words like "fuck" and "goddamn" under a column listed "DO NOT USE." He no longer screams like he's transforming into a werewolf, but this album marks the scream of someone who did not vote for Bush in 2004, and is still super pissed about his reelection.