*** Korn

ISSUES

(Epic/Immortal)

Neither a pop accommodation nor a reactionary step back, Issues stays the course and subtly manages to extend the franchise, fulfilling the needs of a genre just new enough to avoid going stale despite repetition. Where most of metal lately has been about jarring jump-cut juxtapositions, Korn's talents lie in synthesis, and they don't make a big deal out of it. Their trademark sounds -- spare, aquatic guitar lines bouncing like sonar off detuned bass-bomb depth charges; deathmetal dirge chords occasionally aligned simply enough for the radio -- are at least as much theirs as anyone else's, which just about makes up for the fact that everything else is borrowed. Jonathan Davis appropriates an all-star chorus of voices-in-my-head: a whiny, googly-eyed psychopath (see Cypress Hill's "How I Could Just Kill a Man"); broad-chested hardcore screamer (see Brutal Truth); deflowered falsetto choirboy (Marilyn Manson); gasping depressed guy (Trent Reznor). Davis's stock-in-trade device is a still-pretty-run-of-the-mill take on the victim as victimizer, none of which adds much to the armchair pop-psych literature on cycles of violation, though I wonder whether Korn shouldn't be relieved of the rap-rock tag in favor of, well, rape rock -- a masculinized, post-Faludi companion to the rape pop of Tori and Fiona. Past the single, "Falling Away from Me," the highlights are where Korn deviate from the script: their gospel intermission, "4U"; the brief interlude "It's Gonna Go Away," which adds a Beasties-style bongo breakbeat to simmering Reznoresque dreariness. Cool.

-- Carly Carioli