Review Summary: An album with a sound mixing Untouchables, Issues and their debut album together.
When Korn's previous album, The Path of Totality was released, most of the fans loathed it for being dubstep. Fans were even begging Head to rejoin the band. While he now is in the band, some fans do now start to want David back. While everyone complains about how Korn are not the same like they were off Issues, Untouchables or Life is Peachy, this album instead has a classic Korn sound. Therefore, fans will have to most likely enjoy this record.
Now that Brian "Head" Welch rejoined the band after he left years ago, he seems to be what helped get Korn back on their more known or identifiable style which has been heard from the style of his band,
Love and Death. With him and Munky, they're doing the guitar riffs that they used to do back in the 1990s where they'd use a lot of tritone and have a very hip-hop feel to the rhythm of the guitar riffs. The one difference is that some of Korn's older riffs from albums like their debut and Life is Peachy is that those albums' riffs occasionally would have this mysterious turntables-like noise you'd hear in the background which is heard in the riffs to songs like "Blind", "Clown" and "Fake". The riffs are back to being aggressive and angry. They even are going back to making those electronic-friendly noises they made back in albums like Follow the Leader as well as even some palm-muting. However, there is a lot of electronics in certain songs. Not a whole ton except for "Never Never".
Ray Luzier was once talked about by the band's former drummer, David Silveria, on Facebook as he said how Ray didn't seem to have the funky feel to his drumming which you could notice about Ray's drumming on "Never Never". But on the other songs off the album, especially on songs like "Spike in My Veins", you'll hear the return of the funky rhythms to the drum beat. The thing is, David Silveria is kind of like a hip-hop drummer, while Ray was more of a heavy metal drummer. However, on this album, Ray ends up doing the funky drum beats Korn are known for. The only difference between his drumming and David's is that David has a more snare drum tone.
Jonathan Davis now is doing the vocal styles he used to do back then. On more experimental Korn albums like Untitled, which had an electronic rock feel, See You On the Other Side, which had an nu-industrial feel or The Path of Totality, which was blatantly dubstep, he is pretty much just singing. On this album he is going back to doing growls which you'll hear in songs like "Prey for Me" and "Mass Hysteria". He even has done some rapping on this album which he has done in classic Korn songs such as "Got the Life", the second verse to "Good God", the post-second chorus part of "Faget", "Divine", the angriest part of "Kill You", etc. In the chorus to "Spike in My Veins", you'll hear some rapping where he'll rhyme along with a funky rhythm to it. Even he starts rapping in the pre-chorus part of "Lullaby for a Sadist", which is the power ballad off the album with a very nostalgic melody to it and some acoustic guitar parts. The chorus has a melody that is really reminiscent to me of that one part of "Kill You" at the beginning of the song but right before the first chorus comes. While he sings a lot then might growl or yell a little, he along with the guitarists Munky and Head tend to do some very melodic choruses. They'd go to aggressive and tritone-filled parts along with some melodic parts. The difference between his vocals off this album and the ones off maybe the first album is he doesn't have anymore of that voice that sounds all irritated and like he's actually feeling angry in real life. But that's been happening since the late 1990s possibly because he got over his childhood.
Overall, this is a great album. For a Korn album, it sounds like it would've been released in 2000. It sounds like a mixture of Issues, Untouchables and the band's debut with a few hints of Follow the Leader and a tiny bit of Path of Totality characteristics. But don't worry, there isn't any dubstep on this album minus the bridge to the song "Never Never".
