It's been a very good year or two to be Brian "Head" Welch. After laboring to build a solo career for eight years and dealing with lineup changes, having the record label he helped start fall apart due to legal issues involving business partners, and dealing with undoubtedly every third person or so asking if he was ever going to get back together with Korn, he at last seemed to find a stable lineup and under the new name Love and Death they've been signed and have begun to finally get some traction in the marketplace.
So, naturally, the best way to celebrate this independent success was to rejoin Korn.
When Welch strode out onto the stage at 2012's Carolina Rebellion festival to play Blind with his former bandmates for the first time in almost a decade, the Internet was rightfully abuzz with people asking if this meant the guitarist was going to return. Ironically, Korn had seemingly just gotten back on their figurative feet after three albums of struggling to experiment and then recapture the magic. 2011's The Path of Totality, a now infamous collaboration with several of the dubstep genre's hottest talents, was a controversial album to some, people who have probably been complaining about the band changing their sound since Life is Peachy but that's beside the point. To those who were willing to listen though it represented a finally confident, assured Korn, one that even seemed to be having fun again. Welch's return on top of the buzz from Totality has put The Paradigm Shift on a level of expectation that people haven't had for a Korn album in probably the better part of a decade.
Those who found the electronic elements of Path of Totality to be an unwelcome change might still be angered by their presence, but they need to look past them. If this isn't what they've been craving for years now, they may never be pleased.
It is startling how little time it takes Paradigm Shift to feel like a return to form. Even from someone who wasn't needing them to, it is so refreshing to hear Korn go back to the good old days and refine them into a modern day form. Munky has done a more than capable job of adjusting to being the only guitar player in a band with songs built around the idea of two guitars and then retooling the sound so as to no longer feel the loss, but having Head play off of him again is such a great feeling. The trademark sections where their guitars seem to be having conversations, one asking and one answering, are such a treat. That teamwork extends the seven string players, Fieldy and Ray have become a much tighter rhythm section than Fieldy and David ever were. Despite personal problems that would've derailed the average person completely Jonathan Davis sounds on top of his game as well. While the heavy has come back, these songs are as melodic and catchy as ever, a mixture that the group struggled with even in the latter days of Head's first tenure in the band. With the electronic elements dialed back to production touches, every song has an added degree of smoothness and technical skill that makes them that much more palatable. In the past the best Korn albums have had a dirty, grungier production style to them that compliments the raw emotional nerves exposed in the songs, but this is a potent melding of a radio friendly sound and the trademark Korn elements without losing the best of either.
There's usually some kind of negative quality to every album, nothing's perfect, but this comes damn near close. I am over the moon for this album, and so excited to have my favorite band operating on this level again. If this isn't in the yearly top ten, I don't know what will be.
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