As long memoried people will remember, I loves me some Slipknot. One of the first articles I wrote on the Internet was a pictoral review of The Subliminal Verses. So much so, that I was going to release a compilation of blog updates called The Moronic Verses, without realising that such an unnessersary book would be self-fufilling in name. But the album was good, their best by a good lead, and so I was pleasently surprised when I found out they’d released a new one when I was busy being told how much horses smelt this holiday.

With a title like All Hope Is Gone, its either going to be an awesome album, or a rather lacklustre one. Wikipedia tells us that we were to expect something with all the experimental properties of The Subliminal Verses, with the brutal heaviness of Iowa. And?

Erm, no.

The Subliminal Verses was a wonderful move for Slipknot, blending wonderfully quirky new sounds into something quite like their old sounds, and by fuck it was good. All Hope Is Gone, however, is a band that made a move, found it worked splendidly, and had no idea what to do with it after that. There’s supposed to be a lot more political undertones in there, but I just heard a large number of words that I could have written in Year 11. Politics and music are very comfortable bedfellows, but you have to do it whole-heartedly, and I don’t think Corey Taylor did in this one.

We didn’t get the bloody-minded madness that was Iowa, but we do occasionly get Corey chanting whatever the title of the song is, like happened in some songs in Iowa. And it didn’t really work then.  And these sounds didn’t have the same  quality as TSVs new sounds. They just sounded… bland, I’m afraid. A band who’ve done many mad things over ten years, and are starting to run out of ideas. Its very depressing, getting all excited over a new album, then being… not disappointed, it was still quite good, but not awesome. I will tell my girlfriend, another devoted maggot, “Slipknot released an album when you were down here with me”, she will say “Really?”, and I will say “Its not very good”. And I will write pointless sentences like that.

But to carry on, the best song on the album was… a bonus track, a remix of Vermillion Pt2. Yes, a song from their last album. Basically, I’m surprised it got so far up so many charts, and I think they’re going to be hanging up the masks for the last time after they’ve toured this one. Unless I’ve been wrong for six years, they stopped being truthful about being in it for the music, and they want to wring out something I don’t know. Album not amazing, me inarticulate. Boo.

Judging by this months site stats for now, it seems the only people searching for my wretched hole of the Internet are people who think I’m some sort of mine of Space Marine information. Such people evidently haven’t realised that said Codex is now very out, and its much easier to go and buy it, or at least hit up a reputable torrent site. When I’ve bought the right arm, we’ll see what my He’stan conversion is.

Until then, here’s some more nonsesne about Nanowrimo.

I’ve scoped out most of the ideas I want to use in my story now, which is always good. The main one being that its going to be done in a similar style to the works of the absolutly legendary Tom Sharpe. If I can pull off a fraction of what he can do with about 50,000 words, I’ll be happy. Nothing this, there’s a number of conventions I have to remember when doing a Sharpe.

• The book must be set in England, or at the absolute bare minumum, have Englishness as a central theme.
• In the fine tradition of British comedy, two of the main characters (usually the first two characters introduced) do not get along, but are stuck in a situation (marriage, working together) where they are forced to coexist.
• One of these characters will set up a cunning plan to make the other one look stupid, and get said other character out of the way of something.
• A combination of circumstances, bad luck, the other character reacting, and the other character setting up his own cunning plan will create a chain of snowballing misadventures.
• By the end of the book, any cunning plans have long since gone out of control, and ended up causing problems on a national scale, so that the government has to get involved in what started as two schoolteachers having a fight.
• There will be a character from the Army, usually a general.
• A character wil hang-ups about his sexuality will be advanced on by a fat, sexually vocarious woman, who will not get the cock she craves.
• A common setup for jokes will be a character saying something, then the book seguing into another characters actions, or another scene entirely, using a play on those words. For example:
• “Micheal dear, I thought you’d stopped smoking!” said his wife, smelling the smoke. He perhaps had stopped smoking, but his hat was smouldering in a corner where he’d thrown it.
• Only its done so its actually funny.
• Usually, by the end of the book, the status quo is completly restored, everything returned to how it was at the start of the book, just with a character or two locked up or blown to pieces.
• It will be a better book than any you’ve ever read.

There we go, how I can fail to do well with a plan like that? Apart from giving up by the end of the first week, of course.