Slipknot - Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses) (2004)
This album is kind of like the black sheep in their discography if you disregard "Mate. Feed. Kill. Repeat." because Corey Taylor changed his vocal style so much from previous albums. Remember that awesome and deranged growly scream he had? Now it's been replaced by this higher-pitched yell! Remember how he didn't sing that much, so when he did, it hit harder? HE SINGS A SHITLOAD ON THIS ALBUM!! In fact, the overall material on this album is a lot softer than anything off of the previous two studio albums. There's two fucking acoustic songs on it, for fuck's sake! And when they decide to crank it up just a hair from there, you get (enjoyable, regardless) buttrock songs like "Duality" and "Before I Forget" which I quoted like a MOTHERFUCKER on my social media profiles when I was fifteen years old. While we're on the subject of musical departures, there's just.. I don't know, there's a lot on here. "Opium of the People" is very punk rock influenced before going into a buttrock chorus, and yeah, it's a good song, but seriously: What the fuck happened to this band? Oh yeah, Corey Taylor's and Jim Root's sudden success of their other band Stone Sour happened. I know it's generally seen as a cop-out to blame the sound of this album on Stone Sour, but come on, dude, we all know it played into it, so what's the use in denying it?
Let's take a moment to look at some of the album's strengths: The percussion on this album is FUCKIN' AWESOME!! It seems like there's a lot more areas where they allowed Joey Jordison and the boys not to just be an additional musical accent in the background, but actually feature around their playing, like an awesome part in "The Blister Exists" where the guitars subside to let Joey Jordison play an awesome marching band beat. It's nothing overly complex that'll give Neil Peart a run for his money, but it's all about implementation, and they nailed it. I'd go as far to say that this is probably the best Slipknot album percussion-wise, even though all of them are pretty great in that regard, and the other dudes in Slipknot that seemingly do nothing most of the time (Sid Wilson and Craig Jones) get moments where they shine with weird sounds and samples to add to the whole "damn, your youth pastor would be TERRIFIED of us!! this ain't no fuckin' Kutless!!" factor of the music, although said youth pastor probably wouldn't have that much to bitch about: There's really next to no swearing on this album. Even though the previous two albums seemingly had "fuck" multiple times in every song, this one is relatively clean and I think benefits for it, especially since it'd be weird to stick "fucking fuck you fucking motherfucker" into a bunch of these catchyass songs.
The production of this album takes it down a notch as well. It doesn't sound as in-your-face as the previous two albums, and is kinda mixed like.. Well, it's kinda mixed like a fucking Daughtry album. That's really the closest thing I can compare it to: It sounds like Slipknot's raw, evil guitar tone was run through some "let's crank out a hit radio single" machine and noticeably weakened, which sucks, because there are some fuckin' guitar solos on this album!! Maybe my memory is failing me, but I don't remember any guitar solos on their previous albums, and the one in "Pulse of the Maggots" is pretty good for what it is. Anyhow, what I was getting at was that these songs don't hit as hard as they should, which.. This is fucking SLIPKNOT we're talking about: It needs to be 11/10 balls to the wall anger! But hey, it doesn't even really sound like Corey Taylor is that pissed off on this album to begin with, which is disappointing, but I guess it goes with the sound. The whole sound of "Here's an album that could get playtime on your local hard rock radio station" kinda thing. I mean, my fucking dad who's in his 60s heard some songs off of this album on Pandora and dug them. My dad liked some fucking Slipknot songs. I'm not the type of person to be embarrassed by sharing an interest/musical taste with a parent, but.. God, man.
There's not a single bad song on the entire album outside of "The Virus of Life" which is another one of their "ooo I'm so dark and tormented" songs in the same vein as "Tattered & Torn" or the title track off of "Iowa", and I actually like the album for what it is, but dammit, it is a disappointment coming from their track record before it. It doesn't sound like Slipknot and I honestly think that if you played me this album without telling me who it was by, I'd have no fucking idea. I have to stress again: This is a good album. There are plenty of good songs to be found on it if you ignore some of the buttrock nature that haunts it, with the acoustic track "Vermillion, Pt. 2" being one of my favorite songs that they've put out, but it's like if.. I don't know, The Dillinger Escape Plan put out a genuinely good ska-punk album. You'd listen to it and be all "This is good, yeah.. But what the fuck" and that fucking sucks when it comes to a band that had a great self-titled and "Iowa" firmly under their belts. It really might as well have been a Stone Sour album, and that's coming from a guy who likes Stone Sour. I don't want to use the term "sellout" because I don't give a fuck if an artist sells out or not, because we all gotta make money somehow, but seriously.. What the fuck happened and why?
7/10
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