Slipknot are never too far from trauma. Having long outlived the terrors of nu-metal, the Iowan masked behemoths’ last album, .5: The Gray Chapter, channelled their grief at founding bassist Paul Gray’s fatal overdose. This sixth album’s similarly tortuous gestation included frontman/best-selling author Corey Taylor’s marriage break-up and a bizarre incident where guitarist Mick Thomson was stabbed in the head by his brother. With so much to be furious about, We Are Not Your Kind contains their most brutal music and yet, albeit occasionally, their gentlest too. The 14 songs push their sonic envelope, meaning that their trademark hooligan riffola and tribal drumming co-exist with experimental krautrock and (gulp) acoustic strums. The electro-pulsing My Pain and avant garde, percussive Spiders have a whiff of Depeche Mode about them, while the silky chorus of the otherwise punky metal Nero Forte wouldn’t be out of place in a mainstream pop banger.
Taylor typifies the album’s extremes, mixing guttural roars with catchy singing and addressing self-esteem, depression and alcohol abuse with unflinching rawness. The epic, choir-augmented, anti-religious Unsainted may or may not contain a reference to ex-wife Stephanie Luby (“You didn’t want me … so I’m setting you free”), but he certainly doesn’t sound as if he would welcome being told, “Plenty more fish in the sea, mate”. Overall, it’s an album designed to thrill and perhaps tentatively expand their fanbase, while the fiercely synth-rocking Solway Firth duly raises a middle finger to everybody else.
