Korn: The Untouchables

BY RUSSELL BAILLIE

(Herald rating: * * * * )

No one in hard rock delivers the alienation message quite the way Korn do. "I'm feeling alienated" they scream in more than one of the 14 tracks on this, their fifth album. There's also "frankly I'm disappointed in the way my short life has turned out so far" "I hate it when you do that" and, indeed, "[expletive] you."

Yes, we're paraphrasing. Apart from the last bit.

However, on The Untouchables Korn have fiddled a little with their influential sound - the nu-metal blueprint of brutally down-tuned guitars, a rhythm section that's equal parts jackhammer and hydraulic fluid, and the guttural growls of Jonathon Davis.

The most noticeable is Davis, who, perhaps influenced by playing the singing voice of the vampire Lestat in film Queen of the Damned, occasionally contrasts his grim barking with a high warble, which makes him sound like ye olde goth rocker.

He's doing his best Bauhaus on No One's There, I'm Hiding and on Hollow Life - a song that's an early highlight for its relative refinement and a melody reminiscent of Korn-forerunners Faith No More. So is the delightfully titled Wake Up Hate, which is the most obviously rap-metal thing here, and which also sounds like it sprang from the wreckage of FNM's We Care A Lot.

Elsewhere, Korn's choruses tower higher and more grandiosely than before, especially on the likes of opener Here to Stay, Blame and Thoughtless - modern rock superproducer Michael Beinhorn seems to have lifted Korn out of the sonic murkiness which made predecessor Issues so hard going.

Still, as always, it does go on a bit. But even at its most bleak and disaffected, The Untouchables shows why Korn will remain top of the nu-metal slag heap.

Label: Epic