the Ultimate ROCK REVIEWS section
Slipknot
We Are Not Your Kind Roadrunner
Maggots assemble! Iowa’s finest are back and blazing.
Emboldened by the positive response to 2015’s V: The Gray Chapter, Slipknot are back to their ferocious best on their sixth full-length. We Are Not Your Kind is full of everything that any fan could ever desire, from the marauding death metal grooves that drive Birth Of The Cruel to the acid-mangled nursery rhyme of Spiders. But what comes across most powerfully on this wonderfully cohesive hour of vein-popping indignation is that Slipknot are back to being a supremely focused creative machine again, with tons of the swaggering belligerence that made those first three albums so irresistible. Notably, singer Corey Taylor has seldom sounded more committed or righteously pissed off.
With welcome echoes of 2004’s seminal Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses), We Are Not Your Kind veers frequently into experimental waters but every last mad idea works. More importantly, every last song is a platinum-plated keeper and the best are saved until last: Orphan, Not Long For This World and Solway Firth are instantly recognisable as the heaviest, most ingenious and, yes, best goddamn songs Slipknot have written in a long time.
Dom Lawson
The New Roses
Nothing But Wild Napalm
German hard rockers make it sound so easy.
If ever an album demanded to be heard with the top down while cruising along some Pacific coast highway then Nothing But Wild is it – a collection of tunes cunningly tailored to complement the summer sunshine – this is good time rock’n’roll writ large and played loud. Borrowing more than a few tricks from Bon Jovi and Bryan Adams, The Bullet, Running Out Of Hearts, Down By The River, The Only Thing and Glory Road – nearly half the album – display the kind of bittersweet nostalgia combined with huge choruses that 30 years ago would have ruled the charts and airwaves. Fortunately, the pop-rock sensibility goes hand in glove with a much tougher edge and the remaining songs, particularly Soundtrack Of My Life, Can’t Stop Rock & Roll and As The Crow Flies kick serious ass, as the saying goes. Damn near faultless.
Essi Berelian
Killswitch Engage
Atonement Music For Nations
Veteran metallers still managing to have fun.
It’s been a traumatic time recently for Killswitch Engage. During the making of this album, vocalist Jesse Leach had to undergo throat surgery, delaying everything. So, Atonement could easily have been a depressing, pessimistic album. But not a bit of it.
The Massachusetts band have delivered a thunderous reminder of why they’ve endured for more than two decades. Former vocalist Howard Jones is brought in to guest on The Signal Fire, while Testament frontman Chuck Billy features on The Crownless King. And these are among the best tracks here, as Killswitch flex their muscles yet also show a capacity for dramatic variations.
Nobody will pretend Atonement is a classic. But it is firmly fired up.
Malcolm Dome
The Drippers
Action Rock The Sign
Raucous thrill-ride from hairy Scandi debutants.
Maybe blame it on the Viking blood, but there’s a specific type of rock’n’roll that the Scandinavians do particularly well: a pillaging, booze-flinging, sweat-soaked, party-time take on garage rock that suggests long dark winters are being spent revelling in good-natured chaos. Like The Hellacopters and Turbonegro before them, Swedish newcomers The Drippers are out to bring the party to us whether we’re ready or not.
There’s nothing subtle about Action Rock, an album that takes its title deadly seriously. This is carnivorous, full-speed, full-fat, rough-edged rock’n’roll that worships at the church of Lemmy – The Drippers’ homage to Ace Of Spaces entirely transparent in Bottled Blues – while the choruses are built for mass singalongs as beer flies through the air. Relentless fun, this might be just the pick-meup the dive bars of the world need right now.
Emma Johnston
Feeder
Tallulah Feeder/Believe
Top-down freeway rock from everyone’s favourite Grohl-lites.
Don’t call it a comeback. A couple of recent Top 10 albums might suggest that Newport rockers Feeder are benefiting from the Biffy Effect, or perhaps the trend-blind algorithm tendencies that have hoisted The Kooks into arenas of late, but the truth is they’ve never really fallen off the radar, and have taught their mid-Atlantic pop-rock sound to caress the rock radio airwaves so tenderly over the past 20 years that they might well have dodged the dumper altogether. The single Fear Of Flying might concern the Damoclesian terror of the rock star mentality, always expecting the bubble to burst, but Feeder are still (relatively) feasting, unbothered by famine.
Predictably, then, isn’t out to scare off the casual streamers. Chugging highway rock, screen set as wide as it’ll go, is largely the order of the day, whether it be applied to the Californian punk pop vibe of , the pomped-up or pretty much anything in between. dares to document a with church bell menace and operatic doom and tours Japan on a metallic beast of a riff, fireballing blasts of Far Eastern heat, but the rest is a polished vista rock for anyone in urgent need of a Foos stopgap.
