.5: The Gray Chapter
(Roadrunner)
Three stars
Slipknot have worn their aggressive hearts on their boiler-suit sleeves since emerging from the ashes of nu-metal in the late 1990s.
But Iowa's infamous masked export have lost a soldier in the six years since their previous album, All Hope Is Gone. The bassist Paul Gray died from a drugs overdose in 2010, which explains not only the band's long absence but also the title of this comeback album.
It would be easy to label .5: The Gray Chapter as catharsis via metal, but Slipknot – and particularly their gruff leader Corey Taylor – have long used music as therapy for personal psychological ills. This is a tribute – but not of the saccharine sort.
Taylor’s first words on the record, on the pained intro XIX, set the bleak tone, as he announces “This song is not for the living/ This song is for the dead”.
Sarcastrophe subsequently goes back to the tribal drum tattoos and intense youthful ire that characterised the band's debut album, exorcising demons left, right and centre.
There are plenty of parallels to draw with what has come before. The four preceding Slipknot albums have followed a loose pattern: odd-numbered albums – Slipknot, Vol 3: (The Subliminal Verses) – have majored on the relatively tuneful side to the Iowans' armoury; the even albums – Iowa, All Hope Is Gone – have been all-out sonic war, with brutal death/thrash-metal influences brought to the fore.
In .5: The Gray Chapter, both approaches are pillaged – it's Slipknot's angriest album, yet arguably their most accessible. Case in point: the nihilistic peak, Lech, contains five minutes of carefully controlled chaos, propelled by some of the band's most uncompromising riffs to date. At the same time, it's chock-full of quotable, often-deranged lines, ending with the telling observation that "no one is bulletproof".
Skeptic, meanwhile, is the most obvious memorial to Gray – when Taylor intones the refrain "The world will never know another man as amazing as you", it's actually quite touching.
This isn’t quite a record that will induct Slipknot as all-time musical hall-of-famers, but you feel it’s an album they were compelled to make. Death hasn’t halted them – if anything, it’s galvanised them back into a dangerous machine with the focus and fury that first catapulted them out of Midwestern obscurity.
Whether .5: The Gray Chapter proves to be a full stop to the Slipknot story or merely the opening paragraphs of a new one, however, remains to be seen.