In 2019, there were many album releases; it was especially a big year for metal albums to come out. Naturally as a metal fan, I was very excited for these new albums and many of them were pretty good; personally I did enjoy Dream Theater’s new Distance Over Time, the new Whitechapel record The Valley was amazing, and even the new Motionless in White album Disguise was pretty good. However, not all of the new releases were worth the hype.
One band I expected a little more from was Slipknot. Throughout the years, I have been a big fan of Slipknot. I grew up listening to them and they hold a very special place in my heart. Despite losing many members throughout the years, including the untimely passing of their former bassist Paul Grey, the band has still been releasing music, which I give them a lot of credit for. Slipknot has never gone on an extreme hiatus and they have always been very devoted to the music that they make, which is apparent as every album is unique and has a lot of effort put into it.
However, in my opinion, the new Slipknot album was a bit of a letdown. The album is called We are Not Your Kind and is a little over an hour long; the album contains fourteen new tracks, including “Unsainted,” “Solway Firth,” and “Nero Forte”.
While I appreciate creativity and exploring new sounds, this album could only be described as a bit messy. Many tracks on this album felt a bit out of place and there was nothing that was very consistent or cohesive. An album like this would be fine if Slipknot was an avant-garde band, but they are not.
They make songs that do revolve around many themes but mostly to those who feel outcasted by society, yet this album had a strange almost pop-like feel to it despite being metal and doesn’t connect to their typical central theme. Overall, the album was not my favorite work of theirs to date. Despite my criticism, the album wasn’t terrible by any means and there were tracks on it that I thoroughly enjoyed. It just felt a little thrown together and I think other longtime fans can agree that it was just missing something. However, that being said, I still do love Slipknot and hope to hear more from them in the future.
The next album that I was a bit letdown by was TOOL’s new Fear Inoculum. Personally, I am a huge TOOL fan and have already done a full review on this album before. To quickly summarize it, it was very cut and paste for TOOL. With this album there were parts that I did love. The song “7empest,” which was approximately 15 minutes long, was a masterpiece and may be their most technical song to date. However, I could have done without the gratuitous amount of interludes.
TOOL has always been an experimental band that plays around with time signatures and unique sounds. However, while this album was still very interesting it sounded like a stereotypical TOOL album, that was its main issue. It sounded a little too much like what TOOL has already put out there.
In summary, I didn’t hate either album. I just felt that, with all the hype around them, they were a bit “run-of-the-mill.” I still look forward to any future projects either band releases.