The first notable thing about the new Slipknot album is its intro. A brief piece clocking in at just about 100 seconds, it features none of the hallmark sounds you might associate with the group. There is a static pulse which gives way to curtains of shimmering synths; quickly it feels like it might develop into a Klaus Schulz or Tangerine Dream-style kosmiche piece. The intro is at once cold and spacious, like being immersed in cool water. This gives way to the now well-played Slipknot single “Unsainted,” a song which delivers the standard post-Vol. 3 Slipknot goods but with a knack for sonic detail work and rich heavy guitar tone that feels more modern than the band would technically need. This illustrates that interesting dichotomy of We Are Not Your Kind. Slipknot as a band change far more than a band their size really has any need. And yet, despite how deep and fundamental some of these changes can be and how far afield some of those sonic detours can go, they are still a very large band and thus need to deliver certain consistent elements to maintain their audience. This is at root what causes the at times mixed responses to new Slipknot material within the metal underground. We are at a point historically where there are less people in the metal underground now who have never liked Slipknot than there are people who have once found them appealing; 20 years of consistent presence will do that. Yet it is precisely these consistent elements that inevitably drive certain metal lifers away for much the same reason that the more mainstream metalcore acts like All That Remains lose their more underground fan base over time. However, despite some clear and overt gestures to filling an arena with lit lighters or the paucity of arena metal, Slipknot still manages to capture an oddly artful draw.
Take the track “Birth of the Cruel.” It opens with a sonic passage closer to HEALTH than to Korn before segueing into a classic Soundgarden groove. The middle passage echoes contemporary Gojira (a group that is no stranger to nu-metal sonic concepts). “Birth of the Cruel” is a song that won’t necessarily prove to metal lifer naysayers that Slipknot deserves the amount of acclaim that they receive from mainstream press, but a close ear does at least reveal that there are more interesting ideas here afoot than one might give initial credit for. Slipknot seems to be haunted precisely by the nostalgic image of their sound, an image which hasn’t been accurate since Iowa introduced more explicit death metal and groove metal concepts.
The industrial electronic interlude “Death Because of Death” shows more signs of the post-Vol. 3 methodology of the group where they sought to be a more encyclopedic heavy rock group, one afraid neither of extreme tonalities nor mainstream rock movements while still maintaining a taste for the experimental. Granted, we must dose ourselves; the experiments shown on this record are only experiments in the realm of Slipknot’s body of work and not the overall musical spectrum, and the notes for where these ideas seem to have come from are themselves critically acclaimed groups, diminishing the sense of originality in them.
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