When a metal band find themselves famous, ageing and five-or-six-albums deep, they sometimes announce a return to their roots. “We’re going heavy again,” they say. Often, they mean: “We’re going to copy those early albums that made us really popular.”
We Are Not Your Kind is the latest effort from a famous, ageing, five-album-deep Slipknot. The band have drawn parallels between this record and their vicious second album, 2001’s Iowa, and there are moments in which that dark intensity is matched — the riffs on Nero Forte and Critical Darling are thunderous, with Corey Taylor’s vocals throat-shredding as ever. The rampant Solway Firth is an album stand-out.
It proves what we all knew: Slipknot are at their snarling best when going hell for leather. But their momentum is periodically self-sabotaged by drawn-out instrumental interludes with no real purpose. My Pain is particularly rudderless — almost seven minutes of watery drum-machine beats and listless vocals.
Electronic squelches and squiggles are littered throughout, but seem perfunctory. The record scratches on Birth of the Cruel and Not Long For This World are the nu-metal throwbacks nobody asked for.
It’s hard to shake the feeling that this is a band unsure of the best way to move forward.
