KoRn Ventures Into Dubstep With Their New Album “The Path of Totality”

K-Mac | Dec 01, 2011 | 1 comment

The year 2011 has seen dubstep shift into the mainstream exponentially. In January, Britney Spears’ newest single “Hold It Against Me” had a short dubstep breakdown, produced by superstar pop producers Max Martin and Dr. Luke. This was the first time anybody had heard dubstep on the radio (whether they knew what it was or not). Fast forward to May and flipping through your local metal station you could hear KoRn and Skrillex’s new song “Get Up!”, the lead single on KoRn’s new album to be released in December. Another single was released in October, produced again by Skrillex, as well as up-and-comer Kill The Noise. In interviews with lead singer Jonathan Davis, he refers to this new album as “future metal”, working with dubstep producers Skrillex, Datsik, Feed Me, Excision, 12th Planet, Downlink, Kill The Noise, and Noisia, to make an album that is “very well-rounded, with a mix of mellow, upbeat tracks; possibly the most well-proportioned KoRn album of all time.”

First off, if you’re expecting this to be in any way some deep melodical dubstep, look elsewhere. This is brostep through and through. After listening to the entire album I have to say I was somewhat disappointed. I found myself fast forwarding the tracks a lot, and I noticed that it was always once lead vocalist Jonathan Davis started to sing. His nasally voice just doesn’t sound good over these hard dubstep backing tracks. The only track that that I thoroughly enjoyed was most of the track “Fuels The Comedy” (produced by Kill The Noise). This track is great when Jonathan is rapping/yelling, and this is what really works well with this type of Dubstep, not singing. Some true head banging music. This album is trying to be hard, and the vocals don’t cut it. I think the vocalist from Lamb of God or any other metalcore band could have pulled this off much better (maybe not as radio friendly as KoRn, though).

Besides the vocals, the productions didn’t impress me much either. I’m a fan of all the artists featured on this release, and nothing in here is very new or revolutionary for them, and doesn’t showcase as much of their creativity as it should. It seems as if they were instructed to center everything around the vocals, which left them little to play with or be creative on. I wish the producers were featured as much as the vocals, which could have been really awesome, having some one or two minute-long dubstep breakdowns with no vocals whatsoever. However, I must say that Munky and Fieldy did an excellent job accompanying the crazy dubstep synths with their guitars.

Altogether this album was a letdown for me. I’m sorry if you’re a KoRn fan and this offends you, but I think they did this as a ploy to appeal to the youth of today (let’s face it, KoRn fans are getting older). On the subject of mixing metal and electro, lead singer Davis says that “since day one, KoRn has always been all about going against the grain, experimenting, and trying to take music different places”. I feel that if their intentions were to really do something so out-of-the-box, they wouldn’t be turning to chart-topping producer Skrillex to help them out with their album (Skrillex has also recently been nominated for 5 Grammys, all of which have nothing to do with his collaborations with KoRn). Electronic music and metal have been joined together before, and the only thing new about this idea is fusing a metal band with dubstep, and turning to some of the most popular producers in an absolutely exploding and money-making scene is a great place to start (sarcasm implied).

Since Britney Spears showed the mainstream media what dubstep is, KoRn’s released an entire dubstep album, Flo Rida has implemented a dubstep-style breakdown in his song “Good Feeling”, and Justin Bieber announced that he’s going to start working with “beats in the club, like dubstep” because that’s “what’s big right now”. KoRn’s “The Path Of Totatality” is the first of the sure-to-be many collaborations of mainstream artists and dubstep producers, let’s just hope some better ones come along.

KoRn – The Illuminati (feat. Excision and Downlink)