Why the hell are Korn even still together? Over the past thirteen years (!) since they released their debut self-titled album, they've pretty much done everything that a big rock band is expected to do, they've released seven studio albums, they've issued a greatest hits compilation and an acoustic live album, an album of various oddities and rarities, collaborated with Robert Smith, lost a band member to wacko ultra-Christianity, and founded their own touring festival. Yeah, it seems there's not much left for them to do except to fall into in-fighting, break up, and fight protracted legal battles for the right to use the band name, only to re-form for a comeback tour in a decade's time.

So, this untitled album, which has the band essentially recording as a three-piece with some studio help to round out the album's sound is at best redundant, and potentially embarrassing. Not that Jonathon Davis has a great deal to worry about when it comes to sullying the band's name with substandard material, the past few albums have done a very good job at doing that. Korn's problem is that they are perhaps too distinctive, in forming an important part of the teenage zeitgeist in the mid-90s; they've found themselves unable to detach themselves from that time.

"Untitled" doesn't do a very good job at extracting them from that, as much as it tries. To start with, the album begins with a "evil carnival" intro, something that was done to death a decade ago (most notably, the Insane Clown Posse comes to mind). On Starting Over, Jonathon Davis tries to inject a little dynamism into a rather pallid track by singing parts of the verse in a falsetto, but instead ends up sounding like a ridiculous fusion of Michael Jackson and Marilyn Manson.

This is by no means the only time that Davis ends up looking ridiculous on this album though. Love and Luxury is a laughable effort to carry a vocal melody that makes Davis sound more like a bad synthpop vocalist than I suspect he wants to, and while Bitch, We Got A Problem (probably the most stupidly named track I've seen all year, and this album's new official nickname at the Halo-17 office) starts out well enough before degenerating into a sing-along that's more annoying than getting itching powder stuck in a particularly sensitive part of your anatomy.

For what it's worth, the band does occasionally manage to get it right. On Killing, the band actually manages to generate some music that sounds aggressive and scary, but it's a single island in an ocean of generic faux-angst. Part of this is the fact that Davis sounds more tired and desperate than he used to, when he opened up on "Follow The Leader" or "Life is Peachy", you damn well believed him about his pain, but he's just not that convincing anymore. Another factor is the very industrial production on most of the tracks, which brings to mind mid-90s Trent Reznor, another artist who was stuck in the 90s zeitgeist before he escaped this year with "Year Zero".

It's obvious that Korn see that they need to evolve, and, bless their little hearts, they try their hardest on this album. Unfortunately, they're held back by a basic inability to carry a melody, some truly bizarre recording decisions, and the fact that their lack of song writing ability is cruelly exposed when they try to write something that isn't a ferocious slab of nü-metal. Perhaps a ten year hiatus followed by a reunion tour and album is the best way to go if they really want to sound fresh again.