Music Review:
Iowa is not just the first great
record of the nu-metal era - it's better than that. In
fact, Slipknot's second album may be the only platter
of its day and subgenre that, in five or ten years, we
call "classic," with the same awed breath we
reserve for Black Sabbath's early monsters, Metallica's
Master of Puppets and Rage Against the Machine. Next to
Iowa's hell-hop polydrumming and nail-bomb showers of
soprano-drone guitar and sampled squeal, nearly everything
else in modern doom rock sounds banal, the empty yap of
mall gangstas.
One of the best things about Iowa is
the way singer Corey Taylor turns his wrath and bloodied
bark on Generation Whine in the hot, short bomb "I
Am Hated": "They all lost their dad, or their
wife just died/They never got to go outside - Shut up/Nobody
gives a fuck." Somebody had to say it: When did metal
become a bellyacher's music?
If it was just about excess, Iowa would
be impressive but not deadly. The compound slash of rusted-machete
guitars and turntable wibble is now common tongue in hard
rock. And there isn't much shock value left in the words
fuck and shit, which Taylor uses in some variation more
than forty times in Iowa's sixty-six minutes. You really
notice his knack for violent oath and psychotic metaphor
when he keeps it clean in the soft-loud dementia of "Gently"
and the thundering paranoia of "New Abortion."
But the quality of ruthlessness and
sustained physical exertion here is breathtaking: the
impossible velocity of Joey Jordison's kick-drum gallop
and snare rolls in "People = Shit" and "Disasterpiece";
the way DJ Sid Wilson and programmer Craig Jones multiply
the stiletto-lick and power-chord math of Mick Thomson
and Jim Root like a pair of extra guitars; the pagan-kettledrum
terror and thick-riff groans of "Skin Ticket."
Ross Robinson, who co-produced the album with the nine
men of Slipknot, is now officially the Phil Spector
of devil boogie. With an ear for both din and dynamics,
Robinson packs the noise into a hard, black tornado
that is monophonic in force but never obscures the band
members' individual furies.
Iowa's fifteen-minute title track is actually less
interesting for Taylor's corpse-love soliloquy than
the band's vivid evocation of a makeshift-cornfield
grave at midnight. It's weird, too, to hear Slipknot
pull some punches in "Left Behind," an obvious
radio biscuit that sticks out here like a clean thumb.
Yet those are minor beefs. With Iowa, Slipknot go to
the head of the slag heap, the new kings of extreme.
They may wear clown masks, but they're no bozos.
DAVID FRICKE
Rolling Stone magazine |
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