Eight may be the lucky number for nu-metal pioneer Korn. Two years after its seventh release and minus two band members, the group burst back into the rock spotlight with its eighth studio album. The record was released July 31 and made its debut at No. 2 on the Billboard charts.
The follow-up to 2005’s See You On the Other Side carries no title, but lead singer Jonathan Davis made it clear he doesn’t want everyone labeling it blandly as “Untitled.”
“It’s not called ‘Untitled,’ but that’s what everyone’s calling it. We didn’t want to put a title on the record. We wanted the press and fans to come up with a name,” Davis said in an interview with Real Detroit Weekly.
Korn II, 8, Korn 2007, Untitled, Crap - whatever the listener’s designation, it’s absolutely Korn’s best album in years. It’s like the band took the best parts of each of its previous albums, added a few new dance hall twists, and turned the musical blender on frappe. Perhaps the absence of a title, as with the self-titled debut, is symbolic of a band’s journey come full-circle – one also signified by the end of Korn’s contract with Virgin Records.
Davis told Real Detroit Weekly that the main inspiration for the latest effort came from a near death experience last year.
“When I was in Europe I came down with a blood disorder called ITP, and thinking I was going to die, made me rearrange my priorities in life, and think about what’s really important. It kept going through my head, me dying and my sons not being able to have a dad to grow up with, s*** drove me crazy. I really pooled from that experience to write a lot of the lyrics.”
This can be heard on the second track, “Starting Over,” a head nod to his battles with the blood disease and alcohol and drug addiction. The song features distortion galore and Davis’ trademark wail and sounds like it could have been taken straight from his contribution to the “Queen of the Damned” soundtrack.
Personnel losses resulting from guitarist Brian “Head” Welch’s departure after a “spiritual awakening” and drummer David Silveria’s hiatus to spend time with family have taken the band down to three of its original members: Davis, bassist Reginald “Fieldy” Arvizu and guitarist James “Munky” Shaffer.
It happens to every decade-old band that has multiple albums. The sound either stays relatively the same throughout the course of the records or evolves exponentially. Korn’s case has obviously been the latter — a case of spectrum-spanning sound change.
Korn fans who have followed the band from the start would probably argue that each consecutive effort gets less noteworthy, with the debut self-titled album and follow-up Life is Peachy being the best from the group. However, you can label that group’s music nu-metal, you can label it rap-rock…whatever genre you stick it with, it’s evident that Davis’ heart and soul went into this project.
At this point, the commercialization of bands can’t help but leak into the music, but this time around, the end result is…well, delightful, for a change.
The album’s first single, “Evolution,” is Davis’ wailing rant on the politically- and socially-charged subjects of war and global warming.
“It’s about how us as human beings haven’t evolved in the thousands of years we’ve been around,” Davis told Billboard.com. “We’re no different than monkeys. We’re territorial and we fight, and we’re destroying our planet. Why haven’t we evolved? True human beings wouldn’t be destroying each other and blowing s*** up. They’d be compassionate and they’d love one another and there’d be no violence.”
This is a band whose originality has sparked either outright love or blind hatred in the minds and ears of reviewers and music lovers everywhere, and the mixed reviews for this latest album substantiate nothing less. Entertainment Weekly praised this album as being the band’s best release since 1999’s Issues, while a reviewer for Rolling Stone asserted that Korn sounds “wounded and diminished” and that this album “sounds like the final aria - the death scene.”
However, Korn’s new effort sounds more like a blissful awakening – one marked by a band’s triumphant attempt to slip into its comfort zone without worrying what everyone else thinks.
This is Korn’s best album in a long time and well worth a purchase and multiple listens.
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i think personally that this album is all the best in one and the name of it should be something like “growth of a lifetime” because it talks about the world not advancing and that it should be and it is trying to influence a growth of human welfare