I am old enough to remember Slipknot’s early days. The buzz, hype and the mystique that surrounded them before they released their self-titled album – which I duly purchased – painted them as a bunch of total mental cases that wore the masks so they could do what the fuck they wanted and could anonymously replace each member if one of them quit or died. Their masks were a rejection of the mainstream and marked them out as something darker and less predictable than everything else Nu that was being shat out of 1999. So what happens when you remove those masks and renege on your initial statements of intent? Well on one level you retain the street cred of latter day Glen Benton, and on another you become Kiss circa 1983. Enter Stone Sour.

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