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Slipknot hail from Iowa and play what is fundamentally death-metal, but they do so with two novel ideas: they are a large ensemble, not the stereotypical quartet, and they wear horror costumes. Thus Slipknot (Roadrunner, 1999) leverages turntables, samples and percussions, not just guitars, to achieve maximum ferocity, in a manner that makes Slayer and Sepultura pale.
The music is excessive and furious, with frequent changes of pace, and a wealth of sonic detours. The grotesque panzer dance of Sic lets the vocalist scream his vulgar outrage over tribal drums and mad guitars. A similar farcical posture, conjuring images of a witches cancan, underlies Surfacing, while the turntables hark back to the industrial devastation of Cop Shoot Cop. The limping pace and the agonizing guitar riffs of Eyel E SS sound like a vaudeville sketch in hell. The epic rap of Spit It Out indulges in wild dynamics, for example repeating the refrain in two completely opposite tones, that demonstrate the difference with, say, Kid Rock. This style that straddles the line between tragic and comic reveals its desperate face in Liberate, not a song but an act of vomiting, and No Life, not a song but a schizophrenic duet between an evil and a wise selves.
In the middle of this uncontrolled havoc, the bands suddenly turns into Nirvana copycats with the relatively catchy refrain of Wait And Bleed, while Tattered And Torn is an avantgarde piece masquerading as a personal exorcism. And the album closes with the total chaos of Scissors (nine minute), a Freudian descent into a damned soul. There is enough variety to engage the listener in a re-examination of her metal stereotypes.
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