Review Summary: Filled with some of Slipknot's greatest songs up to this point in time, the album finds itself injured by a pretentious amount of filler and dull tracks.
After 6 years, the death of Paul Gray, and the firing of Joey Jordison, the band got back into the studio, wrote and recorded another long LP, and had some serious marketing to promote it. After a couple solid singles and a lot of hype, Slipknot released The Grey Chapter.
Was it good, yes, that can definitely be said, two of the tracks got Grammy nominations - but who really cares about metal Grammys - and had a decent amount of solid songs. Devil in I, AOV, Custer, Nomadic to name a few. Each of these songs is well written, well produced, and well played. Brutal and melodic, these tracks are certainly enjoyable and compel a second listen.
However, for the great tracks that we received, we also got much weaker songs. If Rain is what You Want, The One That Kills the Least, Be Prepared for Hell, and Goodbye just feel uninteresting and skippable. Especially XIX, which defines the word “filler”. It serves little to no purpose other than being a concert opener and is entirely forgot once Sarcastrophe is welcomed to our ears. If one or two of these songs had been on the album, similarly to Vol. 3, then this would have been a different story, but there is just a plethora of them.
Annoyingly, the album about an hour long, meaning that many of the slower, filler-esk songs could have easily been removed from the regular LP and (perhaps) been put onto the deluxe edition instead. It would not have hampered the album to shorten the run time and just have the heavier, more solid songs instead of infusing the uninteresting songs with the good ones.
They weigh down what is otherwise a very solid album with some of Slipknot’s best songs so far. Slipknot was not able to write an hours worth of great songs and should have stuck to 35-45 minutes of great songs. It would’ve been a better buy for the listener and, at least for me, garnered a higher rating.
To finish, I would like to paraphrase a nameless ghoul from Ghost, who said that they stick to writing shorter albums because it is really hard to make a long album of great songs and would rather have a shorter album filled with great songs that they could be proud of.
P.S: Don’t even bother with the clean edition of the album, very little is more disappointing that hearing Custer’s chorus going, “Cut, Cut, Cut me up and ----, ----, ---- me up”. That is just saddening.
