Korn sounds more than ever during Requiem as a simply good rocking grunge band ★★★☆☆

In the early nineties the band Korn started a fresh movement in metal. The nu metal introduced hip-hop, funk and electronic auxiliaries to the square guitar genre, and it wasn’t appreciated by all. The genre became especially popular with the skating youth, sank into the history books during the nineties, but now and then experiences a small revival.

On the new record Requiem Korn doesn’t really seem interested in the fashionable wave movement. The band made the fourteenth album from the heart, and that is good listening news. Gone are the gaudy mixed brews; in the opening track Forgotten you hear the tight and riffing rock work that made the band so attractive in the early days, plus the infectious choruses and vocals of vocalist Jonathan Davis. Korn sounds more than ever during the album as a simply good rocking grunge band, in which a lot of Alice in Chains can be detected. And that too is good news.

Suddenly the band is doing quite well. That’s remarkable, because the members, especially vocalist Davis, took legendary bad care of themselves throughout their careers. Davis went through a lot of misery – he lost his ex-wife four years ago to an overdose – and he seems to have thought that it is good to sing the suffering off. He does that in beautiful, moving and sincere rock tracks like Start the Healing. He calls on himself to step over the pain: ‘Break apart the pain and start the healing.’ But the hollow, dark guitar riff behind him seems to want to draw Davis back into the dark. A powerful and accessible rock song, and one of the better Korn songs of the past decade.

Requiem may not be an innovative masterpiece, not every track grabs you by the throat and sometimes the pop choruses start to annoy you, but in a month with little uplifting heavy releases on the agenda, Korn does just as well as a booster of a pleasant weekend.