Korn is:
* Jonathan Davis – vocals
* James "Munky" Shaffer – guitar, lap steel
* Reginald "Fieldy" Arvizu – bass
* Ray Luzier – drums
Here, Ross Robinson, the producer of Korn's first two albums, returns, and thus, this is dubbed
Korn III, implying that this is the third "real" Korn album. Except, two of the original band members have left for good: one became a devout Christian and refused to involve himself in any music that didn't feature praise of Jesus, the other retired from music entirely and started a restaurant. Also,
Follow the Leader was significantly better than this album.
Musically,
Remember Who You Are attempts to combine some of the more "experimental" (read: pretentious) aspects of the band's recent music, as displayed in their untitled album and
See You On The Other Side with the aggression of their first two albums. As a result, there's a series of, pretty much filler tracks, consisting of dissonant sounds, combined with the usual angry, fearful, grinding Korn sound.
The problem here is that I don't think the band is feeling it anymore. Take, for example, Jonathan Davis' lyrics. I can imagine Jon being unhappy on his band's first LP, or reflecting past experiences of unhappiness on further albums, but at this point, we're hearing a bunch of rich rock stars complain about how much their life sucks. Korn used to make fun of this ***. They've become who they hate.
While I can find some enjoyable things about past Korn albums, I don't think this album is in the least bit enjoyable. It's a daunting task to listen to the album, whose lyrics revolve around things like depression, anger at the world, addiction to pharmaceuticals, life sucking, etc., and whose music entirely consists of grinding, dated nu-metal with muddy-sounding electric guitars and a barely-tuned bass guitar producing slappy glitch sounds.
Adding to that, too many of the songs sound the same. "Oildale (Leave Me Alone)" and "Lead the Parade" are pretty much exactly the same in terms of sound and lyrical subject matter: angry, angsty marching music of the damned. Believe me, this is much worse than that description sounds. And 95% of the album sounds exactly like this. In addition to Jonathan Davis' lyrical subjects being difficult to listen to, the vocals here are also difficult to listen to as well. It's not in the least bit worth while to listen to some guy scream and growl things like "WHAT THE *** DO YOU WANT WITH ME?!?"
