Stone Sour are mallcore. Such a diss is only to be expected if you choose to release an album on Roadrunner. Broadening your sound to the dismay of hardcore purists likewise makes Corey Taylor’s “anything but a side project” Stone Sour the easiest of targets.

Taylor, of course, more famously fronts Slipknot, Yet Stone Sour actually pre-date the masked mayhem-makers as Taylor left the group’s first incarnation to join up with Slipknot in 1997 before Stone Sour reformed in 2002. Slipknot bandmate James Root on guitar, fellow guitarist Josh Rand, Shawn Economaki on bass, and new drummer Roy Mayorga complete the line-up.

Corey Taylor has one Great Big Mouth. And we’re not only talking about GBM Records, the label he’s started out of his home town, Des Moines, Iowa, to promote local bands. On Stone Sour’s second album, he perfectly demonstrates why he’s known in the business as Corey “The Voice” Taylor, lending his emotive vocals on everything from fast-paced frenzied tracks like opener ‘30/30-150’ to the more melodic assault on “inane, innocuous, plastic music”, ‘Through Glass’, Come What(ever) May’s first single.

2006 finds Taylor sober and a figure matured from his hellraising youth. A youth that saw him drop out of high school. He now, unlikely as it may sound, comes across as Des Moines’ answer to Bruce Springsteen, a champion of the blue-collar worker.

So what if you’ll hear Stone Sour whilst shopping? There are far more ear-unfriendly alternatives. What right-thinking individual wouldn’t, just to give one example among many, prefer listening to Corey “The Voice” Taylor than be subjected to the strains of James “The Cunt” Blunt?
(3½/5)

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