March 2020 Feature Release - The Gateway Edition

It's now March which of course means that we'll be nominating a brand new monthly feature release for each clan. This essentially means that we're asking you to rate, review & discuss our chosen features for no other reason than because we enjoy the process & banter. Ben & I will certainly be contributing & we look forward to hearing your thoughts too.      

This month's feature release for The Gateway is 1994's self-titled debut album from Californian nu metal outfit Korn. It was the album that signaled the origins of the subgenre & is still my favourite nu metal release to this day. I look forward to seeing the differing views on this record as I'm aware that nu metal can be a polarizing subgenre.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_hIojjA3A4&list=PLB986D377BCC53312

...Well I was expecting this. Since the featured album of the month for February was S/T by Rage Against the Machine, the precursor to nu-metal, it only made sense that we would talk about the OG at some point.

To be honest, Korn have always been my least favourite of the nu-metal pioneers. Their production has always been lousy, the songwriting has always felt unfinished, and Jonathan Davis writes lyricism from the perspective of an angsty, privileged teenager. I might have excused this if the production was better, instead of having the bass sound like it was replaced by a toddlers rattle toy!

When I think back to my youth, when nu-metal was extremely prominent in the mainstream, I clearly remember how much I detested this band compared to their contemporaries and going back and listening to this album again was a chore. There are a handful of terrible debut albums from nu-metal bands that I would rather listen to again than S/T by Korn. Give me Disturbed's The Sickness or Mudvayne's L.D. 50 any day over this. 

3/10

Hashed out a review for this one as well even though I've never been a KoRn fan whatsoever. I have a pretty...aggressive opinion at the end that was very hard to write in a way that didn't call fans of KoRn out, but I still stand by that this album just feels like more of a personal project for singer Jonathan Davis than anything. 

Sometimes you just gotta yell into a creative void to help you get over your problems, and his experiences just happened to resonate with a large group of younger people at the time. I honestly really dislike KoRn, but I can't act like the start of Nu-Metal wasn't an important stepping stone to the other...questionable modern metal trends that have popped up from the 2000's onward. 

1.5/5