Korn

With their second album, Life Is Peachy, Korn have enhanced their metallic influences, delving deeper into murky sonic textures and grinding, menacing rhythms straight out of underground black metal. Korn add enough elements of alternative rock song structure to make the music accessible to the masses, and their songwriting has continued to improve. Nevertheless, the band's main strength is their raging, visceral sound, which is far more memorable and effective than their songs. The riffs might not always catch hold, but the primal guitars and vocals always hit home.

Nearly 30 years into their career as one of the most globally recognized hard rock bands‚ not to mention pioneers of nu metal, proving severe guitar syncopation and high-octane rap-rock are no flash-in-the-pan genre trends—Korn returns with their 14th studio album. Not quite as dark as 2019’s The Nothing, written in the aftermath of the death of frontman Jonathan Davis’ wife, Requiem is a complex meditation on grief. Not softer, exactly, but nine tracks of real profundity: shoegaze-y detours (“Let the Dark Do the Rest”), death-metal sludge (“Hopeless and Beaten”), metallic scraping (“Lost in the Grandeur”), and the thick radio-rock melodicism of “Start the Healing” (featuring a surprisingly positive message: “I can take it all away, the feelings/Break apart the pain and start the healing”). This is not just the veteran release of a consistent band but one that chooses to evolve with each new record.

Surviving a shaky decade that produced a couple decent albums and few identity crises, Korn bring it back to basics on their 12th full-length, The Serenity of Suffering. It's both a reminder that Korn are the masters of this particular universe and also fiercely dedicated to its fans. Inasmuch as the Korn faithful are capable of fuzzy feelings, Serenity delivers goose bumps for those who have stuck with the band since the '90s. Diehards will notice that Jonathan Davis and the gang have brought things back to the Issues/Untouchables era – especially on "Take Me" and "Everything Falls Apart" – when Korn perfected the combination of nu-metal brutality, desperate vulnerability, and spook show creepiness (in fact, the Issues doll – now wrapped in stitched-up skin with exposed ribs – makes a prominent appearance on Serenity's album art). Without pandering to career-peak nostalgia, Korn deftly execute all the hallmarks that have come to define their sound.

Christoph Korn - Ich Spreche Diesen Text (2016) {Edition Wandelweiser EWR1606}
XLD rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 20 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 17 Mb
Full Artwork @ 300 dpi (png) -> 5 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 2016 Edition Wandelweiser Records | EWR 1606
Classical / Modern Classical / Post Modern / Avant-Garde

Two conceptual compositions from Christoph Korn: the first, "Ich Spreche Diesen" (I appeal to this) where spoken word is placed in a loop and then slowly erased by custom software using aleatory procedures; then "Stille" (Silent), a Cage inspired work. The file sizes are not a mistake, as ridiculous as they may seem. Track 1 has many stretches of silence and track 2 is basically pure digital silence the whole way through. FLAC is not constant bit rate encoding so these files sizes are possible with very quiet / silent tracks that are still quite long.

Korn return this fall with their new album The Nothing, the act’s first LP in three years. Jonathan Davis and company also unveiled the album’s first single, “You’ll Never Me Find. ”The Nothing, due out September 13th, finds Korn reuniting with producer Nick Raskulinecz, who also worked with the band on 2016’s The Serenity of Suffering.