Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 05/12/05
Label: Virgin

In 2005, Korn are mercifully irrelevant. The nu-metal scene for which they were standard-bearers is ancient history, even in its heartlands. It's all skinny ties and spiky new wave tunes round here these days. Thankfully. Undeterred, Korn have - incredibly - enlisted the services of The Matrix to co-write most of the tracks on this, their doomed bid for post-Limp Bizkit relevance. We say "incredibly" because The Matrix's other clients include Avril Lavigne and Hilary Duff. If anything stands as a monument to the craven lust for success that powers America's post-Nirvana rock industry, it's this album.

Thanks to The Matrix, "See You On The Other Side" is packed with catchy choruses. It's also a slick listen, having been produced to within an inch of its life by various alt-rock big guns including Atticus Ross, famous for his work with Nine Inch Nails and, er, Pink. Yet, despite this album's production credits reading like a PhD thesis, Korn's commercial masterplan is fatally undermined by certain glaring weaknesses, the main one being that their singer is a dunderheaded, sexist, self-pitying fool.

With his country in the grip of fanatical right-wingers and wars raging throughout the Middle East, Jonathan Davis remains a man capable of writing a song called "Politics" in which the main lyric runs thus: "Don't give a sh*t about politics…Don't want to talk about politics." What Davis does like to talk about is sex, and sadly he does so in the crassest, most misogynistic way imaginable. You need evidence? Check out the opening verse of the charmingly-titled "10 Or A 2-way": "Press your finger in and out to hold the poison / Lick it dip it and for no particular reason / She crawls on the floor slides against the door / Press your fingers over blossom and it's season." Do you think they'd consider rock lyrics for that "Bad Sex In Fiction" award?

Musically, Korn continue to offer precision-tooled hard-rock workouts that are little more than reliably functional. Musical invention is kept to a minimum: indeed, they only deviate from the formula long enough to incorporate distorted bagpipe samples in a few of the tracks, and nobody needs distorted bagpipes in their lives. Ultimately, "See You On The Other Side" will do nothing to arrest the long-hoped-for decline of whine-rock. By the way, did nobody realise Mercury Rev have an album with the exact same title? Is even one original idea too much to ask?

    by Niall O'Keeffe