Slipknot reviewed

Slipknot
All Hope Is Gone
(Roadrunner)

Certain pockets of heavy metal fandom insist Slipknot are nothing more than goons in expensive Halloween masks whose over-the-top image, not the music, sells their records. If costumes sell CDs, though, why don’t Gwar go platinum? Why aren’t Mushroomhead playing arenas? Looking forward to the new Lordi record? Still digging Marilyn Manson?

Some of us refuse to acknowledge it, but Slipknot are still relevant nearly a decade after their self-titled Roadrunner debut (12 years after their real debut, the Corey Taylor-less Mate. Feed. Kill. Repeat.) because they continue to make interesting music; All Hope Is Gone isn’t an exception.

The record doesn’t jump out and grab your throat like 2004’s Volume 3 (The Subliminal Verses), but in many ways it’s a natural evolution from that album. Slipknot went acoustic on Volume 3 and do it again on Hope with the beautiful, yet thoroughly blackened-basement-windows creepy, “Snuff”; guitarists Mick Thomson and James Root, who flirted with solos on Volume 3, lace Hope with Slayer-charged blasts of fret fire; and Taylor is again given plenty of room to show off his voice and takes full advantage on the soaring choruses of “Sulfur” and “Dead Memories.” Neither metal’s gnarliest growler or the sweetest singer, Taylor’s still very good at both and might be metal’s most versatile frontman.

Those are ways in which Hope progresses, but there are also time when it digresses, back to 2001 and the unbridled aggression of Iowa. Compared to Volume 3, and even much of Slipknot, Iowa was a carbomb of heavy, extreme, and fast. It’s the album that delivered the now infamous “I want to slit your throat and fuck the wound/wanna push my face in and feel the swoon” lyric and was undoubtedly Slipknot at their most primal. It’s a place they return to a few times on Hope, most notably on the title track, a five-minute blood blister oozing with grinding riffs and blast beats (a technique drummer Joey Jordison hardly touched on Volume 3). It’s angry music with an angry title but, ironically, a pessimistic message. Taylor and his eight bandmates insist once we as a country are at our absolute lowest and most desolate we’ll be our most powerful, driven by desperation to do better: “What do you want/What do you need?/We’ll find a way when all hope is gone.”

Maybe then, we’ll also finally give Slipknot the respect they deserve.

8

— Trevor Fisher

Category: Spins, Weekly