Slipknot - Iowa

7/10

If Slipknot's first album is angry, their second is livid. Iowa is 66 minutes of seething rage. The band promised fans that their sophomore effort would be a darker, heavier, more technical affair than their freshman output, and boy is it ever. In a way, the band, feuding with one another, and struggling mightily with their newfound fame, recognition, and success, had no choice but to head in that direction. Iowa is full of vitriol for everyone and everything.
Personally, I find Iowa to be the Slipknot album I least like to revisit. Despite its ugly anger, Slipknot's self-titled debut is both fun and cathartic. Iowa is neither. It is pure misery in 66 minutes of skull-crushing music. The band may have never played tighter, but in the interlocking squealing and bone-crushing guitars, the endless pounding of the drummer and percussionists, and Corey Taylor's exhausting, spiteful bark, featuring his vilest lyrics ever, everything eventually reaches a monochromatically steel-grey aural downpour that gives the effect of ineffectually and eternally punching mud. I can greatly appreciate its non-compromising nature, as sometimes life and relationships with other people can seem to hit an eternal nadir from which there is no escape. That doesn't mean I want to live in that musical space for 66-straight minutes very often. Indeed, Iowa's relentlessness isn't helped out by its track lengths. The self-titled debut's songs were often in the three-minute range and felt more diverse in sound and feeling. On Iowa, the songs more often than not eclipse four minutes, with the monster titular final track stretching out the album's average song-length to nearly five. That's a lot of musical and emotional pummeling.
Iowa's only breather of sorts is that closing 15-minute title track, which consists of mostly funereal, tribal-esque percussion, with the guitars cranking up at select moments, and terrifying atmosphere permeating throughout (the DJ's effects throughout the album are constant in the mix, making a headphone listen of Iowa an exercise in paranoia). Taylor mostly rambles in the background, and yet the lyrics are the album's ugliest, creating a closing emotional curtain that's somehow even darker than the preceding 51-minutes. Reportedly, Taylor was cutting himself with glass, and vomiting on himself during the recording of the track. Granted, Slipknot's musical function is the same as vomiting. It's ugly, but it is also extremely cathartic, and sometimes the only way to feel better, but only if you flush it down the toilet and get rid of it...not when you get it all over yourself. On Iowa, the purging is all there, but too often, despite the stunning technical display and admirable dedication to heaviness, the vomit soaks through, and the catharsis never comes.

Also, considering we are in the "S"'s, since Sufjan Stevens isn't going to finish his 50 states project, can we just say that Iowa is the album he was going to make?

2001 Roadrunner Records
1. (515) 0:59
2. People = Shit 3:35
3. Disasterpiece 5:08
4. My Plague 3:40
5. Everything Ends 4:14
6. The Heretic Anthem 4:13
7. Gently 4:54
8. Left Behind 4:01
9. The Shape 3:37
10. I Am Hated 2:37
11. Skin Ticket 6:41
12. New Abortion 3:36
13. Metabolic 3:59
14. Iowa 15:03