Once a week on Metal Hammer, we’ll be picking one of the best albums of the decade and lavishing you with the story behind the record, related videos and links. To kickstart the series, we’re taking a look at Slipknot’s landmark modern metal masterpiece, ‘Vol.3: (The Subliminal Verses).Coming off of the back of the ‘Iowa’ album, Slipknot had been painted as a band in disarray. At the risk of sounding a wee bit on the cheesy side, the press were painting them out as a band at war.
It’s well documented that the band were growing apart as people, interviews on the ‘Iowa’ tour had members firing pot-shots at each other from every angle and when Joey Jordison and Corey Taylor began to enjoy massive success with their side-project bands The Murderdolls and Stone Sour respectively, the future looked bleak for the 18-legged Des Moines noise machine.
With Corey Taylor talking about Stone Sour having a longer shelf-life than Slipknot and his drinking spiralling to an astonishing level, the band moved into Rick Rubin’s famed recording studio, The Mansion, to work with the bearded legend himself on the band’s third outing. With Rubin’s production technique being to leave a band for days and some times weeks at a time to hammer out their best material amongst themselves, this decision was a risk that could have ended the band for good.
Instead, Slipknot created a record that still stands as one of the very best metal releases of this decade.
While it was expected that the ‘Knot would tear each other limb from limb and many were already ringing the band’s death knell, they hammered out their differences, solidified as a unit and wrote an album that is considered by many the best of their career. Whether it was intended or not, Rubin’s alleged lack of participation inadvertently contributed to this finished product massively whilst the band took their melodic leanings to heights that it can be argued that no other metal act have touched in the noughties.
Did Taylor’s time in the more melodic-leaning Stone Sour contribute to this? It could definitely be argued so. The most impressive thing about ‘Vol. 3′ is that there’s so many great vocal lines without the band having to play down any of their trademark ferocity.
Want evidence of this combo? Listen to the rabid crowd at Download roaring ‘Clau-stro-pho-bic!’ and ‘cat-o-stro-phic!’ in ‘Before I Forget‘ while going seven shades of ape-shit. Indeed, when Slipknot released their self-titled record in ‘99, we never thought that they could top ‘Wait And Bleed’ for an anthem. The intro to ‘Duality’ at Download this year tells you how wrong we were. Evidence of this combination of beauty and brutality? Listen to 80,000 people screaming “nothing is what it seems!” from the same performance.
Slipknot also made a mockery of some of the accusations levelled at them prior to the release of ‘Vol.3′. ‘Vermillion Pt. 2′ was a haunting acoustic track that recalled Alice In Chains’ best acoustic moments whilst establishing Corey Taylor as one of the finest rock vocalists of his generation. Interestingly, ‘Vol. 3′ was also the first Slipknot record to not carry a ‘Parental Advisory’ sticker as Taylor wanted to dispell any preconception that his lyrics relied on swearing for shock-factor.
Quite simply, this is about as perfect as modern metal gets. The heaviest band to ever bring the mainstream to them, this is Slipknot’s finest hour.
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