What the world needs now is love, sweet love. Instead we get a new Korn album. Oh well. Perhaps somewhere in the midst of this stygian gloom, we may find a scintilla of hope for the future? “God is trying to take me out,” barks frontman Johnathon Davies. Maybe not then.
Okay, it’d be a bit facetious to expect Korn to perform a volte-face, temper their malevolent urges and suddenly become the good guys, but their grim latest release mines a particularly macabre seam. From the opening, creepy, carnival instrumental, and the spindly demonic chimeras that appear on the album cover, the scene is set for a journey into Korn’s own peculiar heart of darkness.
The trip proves to be heavy on mood but short on great songs. Promising early numbers – the brooding and punchy ‘Evolution’, the hyperactive ‘Bitch We Got A Problem’ – eventually give way to a sludgy morass of lumpen riffs and sullen, misanthropic proselytising.
The record’s gloomy introspection touches on heavyweight themes of isolation, psychosis and – ahem – climate change, with (it must be said) a commendably bleak outlook. Sadly, for all their lyrical earnestness, we are still left with moderately agreeable fare like ‘Love And Luxury’ and ‘Ever Be’ to mull over. It’s not until the monolithic riffage of ‘Killing’ that the listener emerges from the enveloping fug of malcontent sameyness. Bogged down in a dystopian quagmire, it seems that Korn have lost sight of what once made them so potent. Pity, that.