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(Clicka qua per la versione Italiana)
Summary.
Funk-metal turned into something completely different, halfway into the decade, withe the advent of Korn. Jonathan Davis embodied the post-yuppie pessimism at the turn of the century, and made a career of focusing on the anxieties of disaffected teenageers of the middle-class. Thus the tone of Korn (1994) was bleak, and, while not as aggressive as other funk-metal bands, it had few rivals in terms of dramatic tension. It was only fitting that Life Is Peachy (1996) and Follow The Leader (1998) were confused and insecure albums, compensating a lack of songwriting skills with an emphasis on mood swings and claustrophobic atmospheres.
Full bio.
In the 1990s, with the release of Korn (Epic, 1994), the band settled in a then-uncharted territory where rap, industrial music, grunge and heavy-metal converged. The vocalist, Jonathan Davis, immediately became a symbol of post-yuppie neo-pessimism. Born in Bakersfield in 1971, but having moved to Huntington Beach, one of Los Angeles' most conservative counties, Davis was educated in classical music. His style of singing is one of the most terrifying of our times, embodying all the psychological discord of the common young man. The rest of the band takes cues from groups such as Sepultura, creating, through their own technical competence, a rough and ferocious style that earned them millions of fans.
The album is filled with intense, rattling pieces, such as the opening track Blind, which is as roaring and bombastic as the heaviest of death metal and torn by an excruciating sense of desperation. The profoundly somber lyrics reflect an almost Leopardian idea of the hostile human nature and the inevitability of pain. Shoots And Ladders, which opens with a requiem-like sequence played by bagpipes, is composed exclusively of nursery rhymes - with some of them dating back to the Middle Ages - and brings to light the most disturbing psychological aspects of Davis' soul. The centerpiece of the album is also its most tense and subdued song, Faget, which manages to convey a sense of pure anger in the verge of bursting into full-blown wrath.
The whole album - from Clown to Ball Tongue, from Lies to Divine - serves as a sort of vehicle trough which Davis exorcises his terrible childhood (with animalistic scream after animalistic scream, brutal riff after brutal riff, hysterical beat after hysterical beat, psychotic chant after psychotic chant). Davis is so absorbed in letting out his anguish and Freudian nightmares that some songs (Need To) can barely be called music, being composed only of screams, limping cadences and shuffling riffs.
Daddy, a Freudian psychodrama reminiscent of The Door's The End, lasts seventeen minutes, opening with an acapella choir that seems to transport the listener to a monastery and later, trough the use of harmonically dissonant vocals, to a psychiatric hospital. Between flashbacks of torture chambers - hysterical chants of singing, prolonged distorted guitar riffs - and Tartarean rooms - the music stops, the singer groans, a female voice intones a lullaby -, the band sonically conveys the image of a terrifying abyss of suffering, in which millions of young teenaged boys recognized themselves.
The guitar interplay between James "Munkey" Shaffer and Brian "Head" Welch shine throughout the album, and David Silvera's drums and Reggie "Fieldy" Arvizu's bass playing complement the guitarists in a wholly original way. This is one of those records that managed to save heavy-metal from stagnation.
(Translated from my original Italian text by ChatGPT and Piero Scaruffi)
Life Is Peachy (Epic, 1996) is the album that marked Korn’s commercial breakthrough (it reached number three on the charts). It opens with Twist, a grand vocal showcase by Davis, who grunts like Captain Beefheart over an industrial rhythm. Chi is yet another over-the-top performance by Davis (half Reznor, half death metal) with the usual barrage of guitars. Throughout tracks like Lost and Swallow, the tempo shifts two or three times, and the guitars deliver some of their most jarring false notes. Kill You is the natural continuation of Daddy, just as anguished but far less compelling. Soon, however, it becomes clear that the album is a sterile repetition of its predecessor. As often happens when ideas run dry, the band retreats into obscenity and vulgarity, as in K@#o%! and A.D.I.D.A.S. (which stands for “All Day I Dream About Sex”). The songs are not particularly musical; they mostly serve as vehicles for Davis’s pathetic lyrics. They scare listeners, and that is enough to sell music to platoons of teenagers abandoned (materially or morally) by their parents. Wicked, on the other hand, scares no one, but it points to the (rap and metal) future of the band… Follow The Leader (Epic, 1998) marks a drastic change in direction. A large group of guest musicians helps Davis reinvent their style in the vein of rap and funk, though still closer to Helmet than Rage Against The Machine. Seed, the catchiest track, perhaps represents the perfect compromise between the two. But the album is above all another theatrical display of the leader’s inner turmoil, expressed in the tormented epic of Freak On A Leash, the disconnected rage of It’s On (with electronic gurgles), the absurd calm of Pretty (which grunts a riff almost in progressive-rock style), the epileptic hiccups of Justin, and the demonic apotheosis of My Gift To You. In these songs, the music merely follows Davis’s dramatic gestures.
Davis only needs to be careful not to become a cartoonish figure: in Dead Bodies Everywhere (sung alternating between brutal and psychotic registers), he dreams of killing his entire family, eliciting more smiles than shivers. The raps of Children of the Korn (complex and imaginative) and All In The Family (scored like an industrial symphony) are elevated by additional voices. These tracks also experiment the most with dynamics and sounds foreign to traditional heavy metal. The electronic arrangements emerging from the usual mass of immense riffs and tank-like rhythms are the album’s most original element. Got The Life even leverages a disco-style beat. The fractured harmony of Cameltosis and the unusual blend of Led Zeppelin and grindcore in Reclaim My Place open further avenues. Confused and uncertain, Follow The Leader deserves credit for freeing the band from the stereotype it was at risk of becoming, even if it delivers little music and an even less plausible atmosphere.
(Original English text by Piero Scaruffi)
Issues (Epic, 1999) is even bleaker than the previous albums.
Dispensing with the eccentricities of Follow The Leader,
(and with the hip hop beats),
Issues focuses on what Korn are good at: manic depression
(reportedly, the theme of the album is actually alcoholism).
Funereal bagpipes and a solemn choir flare up from the
brief ouverture, Dead.
Then the majestic riff of Falling Away From Me,
alternating to a limping dance rhythm
and reprising the ouverture's theme, begins Jonathan Davis' rock opera in
earnest.
Even if the pressure and the tension are somewhat contained,
Fieldy's bass has never sounded so bombastic.
Trash follows suit with a psychotic whisper that soars in
an anthemic melody, another mutation of the ouverture.
This song establishes a pattern that is repeated by several following songs:
unnerving low-key passages and syncopated, industrial beats propel the
catchy refrains of Make Me Bad and No Way>
Imagine Jim Morrison of the Doors fronting
the White Zombie and performing
Cure songs.
After the ghostly interlude 4 U, the album
spirals down Dante's inferno with the brutal earthquakes of
Beg For Me and Hey Daddy, both highlighted by sophisticated
diversions (funky bass and reggae drums on the former,
middle-eastern moaning on the latter), exploring repelling depths in the
Trent Reznor-esque
Let's Get This Party Started.
Needless to say, it is Davis' show, and his voice
engages in frightening recitals such as It's Gonna Go Away
and reaches for lower and lower psychological abysses, eventually
achieving terminal apathy with the dub-infected agony of Dirty.
Of the brief interludes that dot the album, the most revealing is
the Freudian rap of Wish You Could Be Me.
Davis' natural next step would be suicide.
Korn is a band that has a lot to say and that can be very effective in
the way it says it, even not all that is said is music (or, in general, art).
In 2002 Davis composed his first movie soundtrack, Queen Of The Damned.
Fieldy's Dreams: Rock'N'Roll Gangster (Epic, 2001) is the solo debut of
bassist Reggie "Fieldy" Arvizu and it's a hip-hop album.
Comparisons between Untouchables (Epic, 2002)
and the "mature" period of Metallica are inevitable. Korn have
improved on all fronts (instrumental skills, songwriting talent, production
quality, singing, drumming) and have come up with an album
that is both the harshest, the slowest and the most melodic of their career.
The mood is even bleaker than on Issues, but, unlike on that tuneless and
almost dissonant album, here the music is catchy
(Here to Stay, Thoughtless and One More Time).
The quantum leap is in the dynamics, and therefore atmosphere, of the songs.
A big contribution to that factor comes from Davis' subtle and acrobatic
delivery (particularly on display in Blame)
The bad news is that the essence of Korn is nowhere to be found.
They used to begin songs with riffs that were mythological tales in themselves:
behind each riff there was a shared system of signs.
Now those riffs sound like business cards. And behind the riff there hides a
conventional power-ballad.
Bouts of despair (the symphonic Alone I Break,
the eerie Hollow Life) are neutralized by the very
system of signs that used to detonate them.
Best are two rap-tinged numbers hidden in the second half of the album, where
the anger overflows in concentric ripples of lava:
the frantic tortured psychotic Wake Up Hate, and the thundering rap
and wall of noise of Embrace.
Take A Look In The Mirror (Epic, 2003) is an ugly mass of swirling
Korn-esque sounds that never quite coalesces into a k.o. punch. It swirls and
swirls and swirles like black clouds of an incoming storm that never turn
into lightning and rain. Just black. Eventually you lose interest and simply
start missing the blue sky.
Having lost Brian "Head" Welch, Korn returned with
See You On The Other Side (2005) that sounded like a half-baked attempt
(with frivolous electronic arrangements)
at some kind of commercial direction that never quite coalesced.
If Korn meant Untitled (2007) to sound modern, they really missed
their target: it sounds like a band of middle-aged amateurs who have never
heard what was being played on the radio in 2007.
These have gotten to be albums made only for contractual obligations.
Were they really such mediocre musicians?
The core of the album was, by comparison with Korn's heydays,
gentle atmospheric and even spiritual.
Korn III Remember Who You Are (2010) tried in vain to return to Korn's
original sound.
The Path to Totality (2011) incorporated dubstep into their sound,
notably the songs produced by Skrillex (Sonny Moore) like
Chaos Lives in Everything.
In 2012 Davis also created his alter-ego J Devil and
debuted the supergroup Killbot with the EP Sound Surgery (2012).
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