Slipknot - We Are Not Your Kind

Apart from the finally realizing release of Tool’s exasperatingly long-teased fifth album next month and arguably Rammstein’s ten-year-awaited self-titled album, Slipknot’s We Are Not Your Kind is and was always going to be 2019′s biggest metal release, and since its release its chart success has fulfilled that prophecy.

 Every new Slipknot release is quite the momentous and fixating occasion for the metal community, both for fans of the band their detractors, and part of these new releases feeling like such a big occasion is because they don’t come often. Despite the band blowing up in no modest sense of the phrase at the turn of the millennium with the one-two punches of their iconic self-titled debut and its successor, Iowa, the band have only released four more albums (including this one) in the nearly two decades since their sophomore album in 2001. And despite the motifs of brotherhood the band make a notable part of their image, the tight-knittedness among the nine of them there always seems to be some kind of inner tension or circumstantial tumult surrounding the band and these releases that results in hiatuses and hold-ups that result in these long push-backs.

The band took a hiatus right after Iowa’s draining touring cycle and volatile recording process that nearly prevented them from getting their first Grammy with 2004′s Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses), after which they took another hiatus before the tense and disjointed recording of 2008′s All Hope Is Gone, which the band have since cited in hindsight as a low-point of moral for them. Bassist Paul Gray’s death after the album’s touring cycle understandably put the band’s future in doubt and, along with the departure of longtime and beloved drummer Joey Jordison, contributed to the six-year gap between All Hope Is Gone and .5: The Gray Chapter (this album’s predecessor), which I consider their best work since Iowa. And Remember when Jim Root said he didn’t want the next Slipknot album to take a long-ass time… back in 2015? Yet, here we are, nearly five years after album number five with album number six. And yet, Slipknot consistently remains one of metal’s most recognized figureheads and biggest touring acts. I mean, fucking Slayer opened for them the first time I saw them live.

As much as we can take their presence for granted at this point, Slipknot’s unprecedented ascent from the desolation of Iowa to worldwide stardom and maintenance of it with a lot of “despite” along the way is certainly spectacularly intriguing. And the band’s sustained high profile could be owed as much to the band’s magnificent balancing act of raw, death-flavored nu metal and anthemic alternative metal as it is to frontman Corey Taylor’s notorious charisma with the metal press and his ability to draw headlines and speak so widely and mostly eloquently to and for the metal community. Like if this genre had to elect a president for some reason and candidates had to campaign for it like any other presidency, Corey Taylor would easily be the most poised to demagogue his way into office, with Loudwire Fox-News-ing behind him the whole way there, and that hypothetical scenario is the only time I will liken Corey Taylor to Donald Trump because I know the former really does not like the latter. But again, Slipknot’s career has been an impressive balancing act of infectious melodies and tasty grooves with unbridled visceral aggression that unites both casual and deeply invested metal fans and that a lot of other bands see as the optimum career model in this day and age (often citing Slipknot as the last big metal band to get hugely culturally relevant outside metal). So with the twenty-year mark of the debut of heavy metal’s arguably last big figure, how does that band’s sixth record contribute to the preservation of their relevance?

Like just about every Slipknot album before it, We Are Not Your Kind came with its own contextual tempest, this time being percussionist Chris Fehn’s suing of the rest of the band for financial injustices just a week and a half after the album’s announcement and swift subsequent dismissal from the band, leaving only six of the nine members that recorded the band’s first four albums. As much as the band’s proclamations of camaraderie in the face of one internal conflict after another might seem unfounded, internal disputes and line-up metamorphoses are a common reality of most bands, and it’s not surprising that the nine members in a band twice the size of the average band in the genre get sick of each other and fall out in some way. They can’t all be Rammstein, but even that marriage has had its rough patches despite never suffering a line-up change. But the falling out with Chris Fehn is not like your usual “creative differences” or “time for a new chapter”. The allegations of unethical financial misconduct by his former bandmates of his lawsuit are seriously heavy and potentially quite damaging to Slipknot’s and that hypothetical metal president’s reputation. Yet it has been relatively quiet since Fehn’s departure, the potential juiciness of which would be undoubtedly squeezed by any surrounding press, which has led to a lot of speculation about the band perhaps trying to resolve this with Fehn quietly and diplomatically and about his yet-unidentified replacement perhaps not being a replacement at all. And I bring this up because of “All out Life”, the single that was released in late 2018 from which this album’s title is derived that I did not place on my year-end best songs list last year because it sure seemed like it was intended to be on an album. Despite being a truly ripping riff-fest featuring the album’s title as a lyric, “All out Life” was curiously left off the final track listing of We Are Not Your Kind, which led to speculations of it being left off for legal reasons in the face of this pending lawsuit (being that Fehn was featured on the track). Yet, the song made it onto the Japanese release of the album as a bonus track at the end, which leads me to explain how I’m going to be assessing this album. “All out Life” is a great, identifiably Slipknot track and the album is better with it, and while it’s not the most official part of the album, I’m listening to the album with it every time, and I’m including it as part of the album for all assessment purposes. It’s a song the feels like it was intended to be more of an opening statement right after a signature Slipknot intro track, and its sudden finish feels a little weird at the end of the album, but it works in its own way as a more abrupt closer more effectively than “Solway Firth” does as a not-so-grand finale. So, yeah, for the good of this album, I’m taking its differently-titled-not-included title track into account.

Okay! Wow! That’s a lot of context; let’s have a peaceful, uneventful album roll-out next time guys, even though I’m sure the seventh album being due to be released (by extrapolation of the pattern of its predecessors’ releases) during the Kanye presidency will inevitably come with some more gaffs, laughs, and way-too-long preambles, maybe stick it out for one more album, Clown, for me, so I don’t have to write another history paper. (Good God what am I going to do next month with Tool’s new album) OKAY! Enough! On to the fucking musical content of Slipknot’s sixth album.

Like I said, I really loved this album’s predecessor, .5: The Gray Chapter; the band were dialed in both compositionally and performatively all throughout the measuredly varied track listing, and the production was spot-on, with Corey sounding assertive and with Mick Thompson’s and Jim Root’s guitar tone to fucking die for. We Are Not Your Kind is a different story. It’s not a stylistically or procedurally radical departure or anything, and much of the production carries over from their last album. But there’s a certain twist to the band’s otherwise enrapturing X factor that feels like they’re trying to do something unnatural for them. And a lot of it stems from the odd bits of widely noted experimentation among the longer-on-average tracks across this album compared to previous albums. It’s not that the band haven’t incorporated diversions into industrial or eerie ambient tension-building territory in the past, but albums past have incorporated these non-exclusively-metal features in cohesive ways that contribute supportively to the albums’ flow, whereas here, the flow of certain songs and certain sections of the album feel disjointed as a result. Also contributing to the weird flow of the album is the distinct era-mimicking of certain songs (quite possibly unintentionally). The album’s opening song after the “Insert Coin” intro track (which might unfortunately be the most meager and least effective hype-building intro track of the band’s six albums) and lead single, “Unsainted”, feels quite like it’s 2019′s “Sulfur”, with the similarly alternating gruff alt. metal verses and soaring cleans on the melodic choruses and the bridge slowdown. Like “Sulfur”, I find the primary melody sufficiently anthemic, and even though I wish the band did more with the choir supplementation that kicks the melody off, I quite like the song. But then there are stylistically schizophrenic trajectory and flow disruptions not too long after, like the distinctly Vol. 3-type groove-banger, “Nero Forte”, whose pair of headbang-inducing nu metal beat and falsetto melody and the battle snare drum march at the bridge akin to “The Blister Exists” are certain calling cards to the band’s third album. Fans seem to have taken quite a liking to this song in particular, and I like the delicious nu metal riffage at the core of it, but I feel like the song is a bit repetitive as it goes on and still needs to do a little more across its run time to feel as fulfilling as it should be. I’m sure it’ll get the crowds moving though, and I sure appreciate that.

The album even presents even full-on callbacks to the fast-paced visceral vitriol of Iowa on “Red Flag” and the industrial nu metal creepiness of the debut on “Birth of the Cruel”. The pensive acoustic strumming and seething melodic guitar work of the interestingly emotionally progressive “A Liar’s Funeral” also feels somewhat lifted from the dynamic of the band’s previous album (which makes for a pretty bright highlight in my eyes). “Orphan” and “Not Long for This World” revel in the same thick, crunchy guitar tone, metallic percussion, loud-soft dynamics, emotive guitar melodies, and elevating chorus vocal melodies that made songs like “Nomadic”, “Sarcatrophe”, and “The One That Kills the Least” on The Gray Chapter so integral to its consistency, and “Critical Darling” feels like it pairs Iowa-reminiscent violent alternative metal verses with a Vol. 3-esque melodic chorus. Again, I quite like these songs. And on their own they are mostly well-composed and all fine and dandy, and I’m certainly not knocking Slipknot for sounding like themselves, but together the songs run like a compilation album with some rarities and scrapped tracks from the vault tossed in the mix as well. But getting past the weird flow of the album is not too high of a hurdle to clear, and once cleared, the album really is a confident, appetizing, and satiating exhibition of Slipknot’s time-tested talents that have put them at the level they are at.

The album has been noted as palpably experimental in comparison to previous efforts, which occurs in the album’s dark, muggy corners interspersed around the usual verse-chorus-verse-chorus structures at the foundation of the album: the ambient experimental bits that take the form of codas like the end of “Critical Darling” or interlude tracks like reverbed xylophone plinking of “What’s Next” and the incantation of “Death Because of Death”.

Despite its cliché title, the album’s most perplexing exercise of experimentation comes on the drawn-out, experimental, atmospheric melancholy of the song “My Pain”; it serves as a breather of sorts on kind of a take-it-or-leave-it basis. And the song “Spiders” I’m not really a fan of either; the repetitiveness of its harmonized chorus clashing with the intended spook of the song gets old kind of fast, which is too bad because I quite like the industrial sampling, the eerie piano plinking, and the weirdly effects-driven guitar solo around it. But honestly, that’s the lowest the album goes for me, and there are still positives to be taken from those songs, which is a testament to the band’s work on this record.

This album honestly took some time to grow on me after my first experiences with its weird flow left me perplexed. But once I got past the flow and familiar with the album enough to be able to focus more distinctly on the individual tracks, I was able to see it as a comprehensive display of the band’s full arsenal of abilities, a balancing act of Slipknot’s long-running balancing acts that still manages to make room for surprises (that the band might be able to expand upon in the future as they continue to carefully develop their sound) without sacrificing compositional or stylistic/aesthetic integrity. Again, the flow on this album is quite unlike any other Slipknot album, but it’s hardly enough to spoil the strong compositions from end to end. Despite my and many others’ high expectations for this album (and perhaps its high susceptibility to disappointment), I was pleasantly surprised with We Are Not Your Kind; and I think the band will be able to look back on this album positively in the years to come. Evidently, we should probably just let Slipknot take their time on the next one too because this one was worth the wait. And I know it’s probably the basic bitch thing to do to praise a Slipknot album like all the other mainstream metal critics probably are, but I can genuinely see why, and I’m not gonna slag an album just because its creators are extremely popular and it looks good for underground karma points. It’s apparently fun for jaded metal fans to shit on Slipknot for not playing 280 bpm blast beats or for using clean vocal melodies and emotive acoustic sections like a bunch of pussies, which is laughable. I mean if you don’t like what Slipknot strive for and it’s not your cup of tea, that’s chill, but if you’re talking shit because you think you’re special for liking a lesser known death metal band that plays faster and think Slipknot is shit because they aren’t doing what you want by not playing like your favorite techdeath band, that’s so tired, narrow-sighted, and embarrassing not just to you, but to the aforementioned chill people you embarrass by extension. If liking a Slipknot album like Loudwire and Metal Hammer probably do makes me a basic bitch, then buy me a pumpkin spice latte next month and send me a crop top with “live laugh love” on it in the form of a black metal logo.

Despite/10