Slipknot (Metal): Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses) : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

On previous albums, the masked maulers of Slipknot took speed metal to new extremes, with songs that sounded like a threshing machine devouring a military drum corps. Now the Iowan nonet has married a little beauty to its beast, with schizophrenic results that are best summed up by the line "The only thing I ever really loved was hate." Produced by Rick Rubin, Vol. 3 (The Subliminal Verses) experiments with even newer extremes, which in Slipknot's case means tunefulness and traditional song structures. At one end of the spectrum, "Pulse of the Maggots" rallies the group's jumpsuited superfans with a Ministry-like turbo anthem. On the other, "Vermillion Pt. 2" goes all Beatlesque with a chamber-pop arrangement complete with cello. Lyrically, the band retreats deeper into a paranoiac's fantasy world in which, as they say, "The test subjects run the experiment." Which might explain the album's occasional missteps. "The Virus of Life" sounds like an industri-metal production of Stomp, and "The Nameless" perversely splices a cooing boy-band chorus onto a g-g-gunking speed-metal verse; just because you can do something doesn't mean that you should.