Album: Corey Taylor - CMFT

The graveyard of tedious musical vanity projects – and the bargain bins of many record shops – is filled with solo albums by the lead vocalists of many fine rock bands. They may sell well initially, due to the power of well-financed record company marketing teams, but they are soon forgotten and adding to landfill sites around the country.

Taylor is best known in the UK as the potty-mouthed lead singer of the excellent, bemasked fright-rockers Slipknot. Providing lyrics for six albums of aggressive heavy metal over 20 years or so, however, must have wrung him dry of interesting things to say, because his first solo effort feels distinctly thin on anything that might command anyone’s attention for long: even though he seems to have tried pretty much every rock genre in order to gather listeners in. There’s even “Home” a soppy piano ballad that could possibly but is unlikely to be a comedy track.

The album begins with the metal-by-numbers of “HWY 666”, where Taylor sings of being chased by the Devil on Highway 666. Elsewhere there is soft rock, in the form of the single “Black Eyes Blue”; a couple of hair metal tunes, “Samantha’s Gone” and “Meine Lux” with its over-busy guitar solo; and an acoustic ballad, called “Silverfish”, which has Taylor laying it on thick about some nonsense or other. There is also a perfunctory rap metal collaboration with Tech N9ne and Kid Bookie, called “CMFT Must Be Stopped”. The promo video for this track features a bragging, middle-aged man backed by women who are young enough to be his daughters in little more than their underwear, and lots of his extraordinarily wealthy, middle aged rock star friends gurning and sticking up their middle fingers at the camera in some form of vapid rebelliousness. It just about sums up the whole sorry project.

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