"Follow The Leader" Review

  Tracks 1 through 12 are silent and are each five-seconds long. The album's track listing begins with number 13, "It's On!".

  Like Fear Factory and a host of others, Korn combines streamlined metal with ominous industrial touches and an undercurrent of hip-hop rhythm. FOLLOW THE LEADER is an urban nightmare, as unrelentingly dark as Onyx, Tool or Nine Inch Nails, and stylistically indebted to all three. The twin guitars of Munky and Head provide the requisite rock quotient, but throughout the album the band ventures beyond heavy rock cliches. The churning, jackhammer rhythms are leavened by subtle synthesizer work and occasionally the band falls into a bracing hip-hop beat, allowing them to show off the hard-edged syncopation that's at the core of their very visceral sound. Fostering the rap influence, Ice Cube makes a guest appearance on "Children of the Korn," and his hellbound, apocalyptic worldview sounds perfectly at home on FOLLOW THE LEADER.

  More than anything, Korn is about sound. They write songs, but those wind up not being nearly as memorable as their lurching metallic hip-hop grind. They have yet to exhaust that sound, and that's why their third album Follow the Leader is an effective follow-up to their first two alt-metal landmarks. Not that it offers anything new -- it's the same sound, offered in a more focused forum than Life is Peachy, but not sounding as fresh as Korn. In fact, it begins to wear a little thin toward the end of the album, but guitarists Head Welch and Munky Shaffer find enough tonal variations over the course of the album to keep it interesting, and vocalist Jonathan Davis nearly matches them with his cavalcade of voices. If the songs themselves don't leave much of an impression, it's because they're not supposed to -- they're simply vehicles for the metallic grind, which provides all the visceral rush any Korn fan needs.

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