Author: Sandi Sadar Šoba
Artist: Korn
Label: EMI Records
Release: 2007
At the turn of the eighties into the nineties of the 20th century, Korn were a cornerstone of a new genre that was only just taking shape in the transoceanic empire of noise. They were something fresh and not yet heard, and the five-piece from Bakersfield instantly won over the hearts of crowds hungry for something new. A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then, and after the brilliant albums came years of flops, commercialization and a watering-down of the whole core of the thing, key members walking out, loud bad-mouthing in the press, followed by volleys of insistence that every next release would be a return to the roots. Now they’ve hit middle age, and on their eighth, untitled album the midlife crisis is poisoning them and luring them back into the abysses of darkness, which they briefly left behind for the somewhat brighter spheres of an acoustic pilgrimage. MTV Unplugged was just a detour, and in their hunger to create something essential again, after Brian “Head” Welch had left the camp years earlier, they had to face the departure of drummer David Silveria too. The ship started sinking in earnest, and from the Korn camp all you heard were cries that this wasn’t the end, just a few slight changes. At the end of July we get the release of the eighth wonder without a name, and everything they said turns out to be a lie.
After a failed start working with producer Matrix, who kicked off the recording of the album, they decided to stoke the dead magma at the center of their universe with Atticus, while the remaining trio of original members kept their fingers on the “great mind” of the millennium. The void behind the drum kit is filled by none other than Jonathan Davis himself, with Bad Religion’s Brooks Wackerman and Terry Bozzio pitching in. Finding firm ground under their feet, or the last flailing strokes of a drowning cadaver?
After the very first listen it’s clear that Korn have become prisoners of their own formula and of empty bluster, which is terrifying, horrifying and dark. Hopelessness and madness blow out of the speakers. A carnival of bizarre figures spins into a dance of insanity and the cataclysm of an implosive collapse of everything they’ve built up so far. ‘Intro’ is a cliché outpouring of the deepest pathos, and a circus announcing the continuation of a fiasco policy of self-destruction. The fanfares of fertilizing blare on! ‘Starting Over’ is proof that Davis would rather run to worn-out phrases and low, croaky droning than pour out any essence. The whole system breathes through artificial lungs. The heart is electronically cold and otherworldly. The wider picture of lyrical confession and criticism has become an agonizing infliction of wounds on a self-esteem that hasn’t quite healed yet. Davis lays himself out on a platter and dissects the realizations of his past battles with alcohol dependence and drug attachment, and tells how a near-fatal blood poisoning knocked him off balance. The direct tempo of rock heaviness gives way to the expected, and the space in front of the curtain of the deviant is left to an almost psychedelic electronic saturation and a coat of minimalist pomp. The oxygen masks have damaged the brain centers for logic and eruptions of rage. Korn are becoming a dance phenomenon. Esoterica and weirdness are the guiding lights. The resurrection of the dead sings the praises of an organon of callous ethics. Time is running out. Something has to be done.
Davis has already preached about the painful divorce and the loss of his heart’s center in the past. This time ‘Bitch We Got A Problem’ sounds less ferocious. It’s closer to a knockoff and a feeble imitation of what Korn are supposed to really be. The copy dominates the whole picture. Munky’s soloing shakes us awake a little, reminding us of something you’d rather expect from NIN. Except that Korn aren’t yet used to industrial muck, and it’s all a bit too much. Only the essential is missing – the message and the substance.
‘Evolution’, as befits the album’s main and so far only hit, is considerably more polished. In a ragged, grotesque sort of way. As good modern-day eco-warriors should, Davis had in mind the black scenarios from the cataclysmic predictions of Nobel laureate and recent US presidential candidate Al Gore while writing this song. You have to address climate change too, after all. Davis does insist he didn’t sink to the level of political drivel. It’s more a direct question about what kind of world we’re leaving to future generations as a legacy of destruction and toxic wrecking of the last patches of a healthy planet. ‘Hold On’ announces something familiar from Korn’s past.
The track that sounds a lot more like modern-day Korn, and my favorite on the album, is ‘Kiss’, which breathes keyboards into the whole thing that slice through the typical Korn groove like a scalpel cut from a cosmetic surgery expert. Korn have fallen victim to the very thing they once denied. A mellotron that sounds downright Beatles-esque. ‘Strawberry Fields’ is an automatically summoned image. It’s precisely the saccharine baroque quality of this moment of displayed fragility that offers a counterweight to the artificial waffling. The interpretation from Davis and company is piercing and full of pain. They drift into the fog of the darkened parts of depression. They fall into a trance and offer up something sincerely modern and all their own. ‘Kiss’ fuses and creates entirely new landscapes, which until now were a carefully guarded secret on Korn’s part.
‘Do What They Say’ continues the cycle of disappointment. The logic of forever forcing something inedible on you is irritating. So much so that after the opening piano drone and cold strikes on the ironware, you get the idea that it’s time for Marilyn Manson and Jonathan Davis to record an album of Christmas duets, because you’ll barely get through the clichés anyway, and if they’re going to milk the cash cow, they could at least spice up their musical everyday with a bit of holiday spirit.
But then you get impaled on the sharpened stakes of desolation in the next drama piece – ‘Ever Be’ is as heavy as a ten-ton block of granite. And like an equally heavy heap of manure it buries you from the first opening verses to the grand finale, to the point where there’s precious little left of you. The chorus is predictable. I won’t deny it grabs you, but somehow it just shoves you into a state of depression when you realize Korn don’t intend to open all the valves. All to fill up the running time, right?
‘Love And Luxury’ is a humorous little number that sounds as if you were twanging a rubber band from a pair of underpants and dancing to the profound outpourings of polished rage over Head’s departure. Brian Head Welch is gone, and Davis feels threatened, as if anyone wanted to forge their fame at his expense. Head met Jesus and left. That was when Korn lost their main source of inspiration and truly heavy, deep music. Head puts out a book in which, in the opinion of his former comrades, he unfairly slags off the people who gave him bread and shelter. Cliché? Immature and juvenile? Davis doesn’t lag behind by an inch on that front. You know how it goes: the wiser one supposedly gives in …
‘Innocent Bytander’ is classic modern-day Korn blabbering, and this time they can boast a couple of album fillers. “Enough’s enough!” Davis screams, and we can only agree. The music that once gave you a spiritual erection now needs a fistful of Aurorix and Viagra thrown in, and maybe then it’ll work! ‘Killing’ struggles, and because of its unconvincing structure it torments us, the random passersby, along with itself. The song was originally called ‘Trained Response’. According to the band, the riff is as heavy as Jahorina mountain, but more than the fact that you’re facing yet another artificial creation, what stands out is that the string-rubbing that sounds the least artificial is the product of Davis meddling in the sound with yet another guitar. With Pearl Jam, Vedder doesn’t bother me when he picks up a guitar, but with Korn the whole thing sounds downright laughable!
‘Hushabye’ is another of the nicer moments of tuneful melody, and your ears nearly get to rest on the verses in which Davis realizes it was all a theft of precious time. Munky reaches for a mandolin and, in the spirit of the Mediterranean, lulls you to sleep so thoroughly that a blow to the head with a club wouldn’t bother you much. After the counting-out rhymes of the first record come the lullabies that have led the drowsy, aging beast to the grand finale. ‘I Will Protect You’ wraps up the cycle in a way that suits this album. Davis grabbed the bagpipes and soaked them in effects. You almost convince yourself the road to the end wasn’t all that soul-crushing and exhausting. And in the Zappa-esque manner of Bozzio’s drumming, the emperor’s new clothes become transparent for all creation to see. Poor rags cover an otherwise rather bare, geriatric body. Time to rest. Time to admit defeat.
After a three-quarters-of-an-hour-long litany of seeming discourse on emptiness, you get your fill of Davis’s poeticizing of the world in the manner of “It’s a sickness in the gene pool”. The prosaic whole has dissolved like a soap bubble, and the broader form that, in Korn’s words, stretched beyond all previous limits has distortedly dissipated in a great dissipation of ideals. But over the individual shallowness stretches the broader shadow of the work as a whole. There are no mitigating circumstances and no easily memorable riffs. No sectionally polished songs. What there undoubtedly is, though, is a clear message of atmosphere and sound above the songs. Korn have forged themselves a soundtrack of decay and emptying out, and they’re spinning their swan song at their own funeral. And the mourners of the tragic fate of a once-promising band are fewer with every album.
Lineup
Jonathan Davis – vocals, guitar, electrified bagpipes, drums (“Love and Luxury”, “Bitch We Got a Problem”, plus additional drums on “Kiss” and “Hushabye”)
James “Munky” Shaffer – guitar (7-string, 8-string), mandolin, lap steel guitar
Reginald “Fieldy” Arvizu – 5- and 15-string bass
Terry Bozzio – drums and percussion
Brooks Wackerman – drums and percussion
Zac Baird – keyboards, organ, synthesizer, additional instruments
Production
Korn & Atticus Ross & Matrix
Track list
1. Intro
2. Starting Over
3. Bitch We Got a Problem
4. Evolution
5. Hold On
6. Kiss
7. Do What They Say
8. Ever Be
9. Love and Luxury
10. Innocent Bystander
11. Killing
12. Hushabye
13. I Will Protect You
ALBUM LENGTH: 48:47
