Review: The Path of Totality – Korn

“We were dubstep before there was dubstep,” says Jonathan Davis. Now why would he say that?

For about twelve years, Davis and co. had a good run. They foreshadowed the rise of a movement, refused to either fade out or morph into fodder for laughter (Limp Bizkit, anyone?), maintained a loyal fanbase and made a lot of money. Around the time guitarist Brian ‘Head’ Welch got baptized, times had changed. Their brand of piercing, bass-heavy metal was more of a rule than an exception. They weren’t the innovators they used to be.

With difficulty in dealing with this identity crisis arose a brief brush with electronic music (See You on the Other Side), a wildly unfocused ‘experimental’ effort (2007′s gimmicky untitled album) and an attempt at revisiting their roots (Korn III: Remember Who You Are). A commonality between the three aforementioned releases was that they all were attempts at reinvention – but Korn refused to take any notable risks. While there seemed to be sufficient alteration in their sound design, Davis continued singing about the same stuff and the remainder of the band refused to budge.

Enter Skrillex. Last year with the Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites EP, the ex-From First to Last singer had transformed himself into the ambassador of a toxic, drop-centric contortion of dubstep which the internet at large has come to call ‘brostep’. Skrillex and his brethren were instrumental in knocking out all the subtlety out of dubstep and replacing it with the manufactured aggression best remembered from the nu-metal craze Korn themselves ushered in years ago. This caught Davis’ eye.

The Path of Totality is supposed to be Korn’s dubstep (read brostep) crossover album. Davis, with blessings from his bandmates invited Skrillex and friends over to help them pour gallons of filthy, wobbly bass over their signature brand of metal. Before the album dropped, Davis went around touting overestimations of his own work on record. “It’s future metal,” he said in their new official biography on the Roadrunner Records website. He’s of the opinion they’re onto something big here – they very well are, but only from a commercial standpoint.

Opener ‘Chaos Lives in Everything’ introduces the band’s new sonic blueprint in a succinct manner. The track is structured like any other Korn song with Skrillex’s thick synths erupting out of nowhere, battling the guitar attack in a precise yet overbearing manner. Although such arrangements are foreign to music at large at the moment, the track fails to exude the feeling that you’re listening to a new iteration of a familiar band. The Path of Totality is plagued by the same problem every post-2005 Korn release carried – the band sounds different yet feels the same. To further aggravate this fault, Davis’ lyrics sound clichéd as ever. It’s like he hides a Korn Lyric Generator™.

A big reason why brostep doesn’t have its Exit Planet Dust is that this style just doesn’t work in the context of an album. While it is perfectly possible for a DJ to introduce enough variation in order to curb boredom, none of the current crop of producers have been able to grasp the dynamics of the album as a cohesive entity. This is reflected in scores on The Path of Totality, as it is by far the most tiresome Korn record till date. The producers’ attempt at engineering the heaviest, most brutal wobble-bass to augment Korn’s heaviness ends up robbing individual tracks off their identity. Past the twenty-minute mark, the songs seem to bleed into one another, growing progressively overbearing to the point of being intolerable.

Despite its mediocrity, The Path of Totality is bound to find success in the current musical climate. Taking into consideration the increasing appeal of brostep and its eventual emancipation from its roots, Korn have made an album that’s got everything it takes to peak within the top ten. It’s appeal is bound to wear off within months, but for now the world at large is likely to consider this a bold, daring turn for an erstwhile pathbreaking band while in truth it remains one of Korn’s smartest commercial decisions.

Indiecision: C