Love ‘em, hate ‘em, ignore ‘em, it don’t matter: Iowa’s most famous nine-piece costumed extreme metal band are back in Canada for another run of shows supporting their most recent disc, ‘08s All Hope Is Gone. And for a bunch of guys who have made one hell of a career out of anger, rage and despair, they’re pretty happy when they’re talking about the disc.

“Oh yeah, fuck yeah, man,” gushes vocalist Corey Taylor. “It surpassed my expectations. I’m very, very happy with it. I still listen to it. I’m just digging what we made, I’m really fucking happy about it.”

Happy? Like I say, anger = career with these guys. But, Taylor says the idea that Slipknot—especially Taylor—is always angry is a misconception, and so is the idea that the only way to let your anger out vocally is through screaming.

“Any time you scream, people think you’re pissed,” says Taylor. “And with good reason, because nine times out of ten you are pissed. But on the other side of that, people think that to show emotion you have to scream and I’ve been the first one to call bullshit on that for a long time. I think we’re able to show more emotion on this album, and there’s a lot of melody to this. It put the idea out there that you can be emotional and not scream blood into your throat. Everything that we tried just worked on this album and just felt really good.”

Taylor is extraordinarily happy because he says he doesn’t always like what he hears when a Slipknot disc is finished, pointing fingers directly at the band’s last, Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses). That disc was a bit more experimental, but that’s not where Taylor’s concerns lie.

“It took me a long time to like Vol. 3, to be honest,” he admits. “I liked it, but I didn’t. Especially my shit. I really had a problem with the vocals, for the longest time. I was trying something different and I was getting sober. I did not contribute at all to putting the vocals together. I was really hands-off. It bummed me out, because it was my fault at the end of the day. So I really started taking a stronger hand at putting vocals together.”

And with All Hope Is Gone, Taylor is back where he wants to be, screaming when he needs to, crooning when he has to, all set to the backdrop of what, you gotta admit, is one heavy album. And, according to Taylor, the band’s strongest.

“I think it’s our strongest album not just for the fact that everything sounds great,” he says. “For me, the confidence in the vocals just comes from knowing I was there the whole time really putting it together. Vol. 3, I just couldn’t listen to it for the longest time; now I listen to it from the standpoint of just remembering what I was going through at the time and it’s a whole different album for me as opposed to for other people.”

Taylor says the writing process saw the guys with no shortage of ideas for this disc. He says he was coming to the band with whole songs for the first time and one of the biggest problems was having to chop songs overflowing with ideas down to size.

“From an arrangement point of view, god, there were eight songs on this album that started out as eight-minute opuses and I had to do a lot of cutting just to get them down to song form,” he says. “It was crazy. But it was cool; we just had a ton of material. Everything just felt different for me. It gave me the courage to take more risks as far as vocally and lyrically and whatnot, but at the same time I was really trying to take a stronger hand in where the album was going to go. It comes off as very powerful.”

Powerful: definitely a word that could be used be to describe the band’s music, along with heavy, brutal and, most certainly, manly. Which is why it comes as a bit of a surprise—to no one more than Taylor—that more and more women are coming out to the shows.

“In the last five years, it’s gone damn near 50/50, if not more in favour of girls,” he says. “It’s weird. And I’m not talking about just 14- or 15-year-old girls; there are more girls in the pit now than I’ve seen, ever. And I mean including going to shows myself. If metal was the last holdout of chauvinistic behaviour, it’s gone now. Because I’ve seen women handle dudes in the pit. I mean, lay them out. It’s awesome. I love it. I’m watching from the stage going, ‘I would have been that dude hitting the floor because some chick just fully elbowed me in the face.’ I never would have guessed that. I’m usually pretty good at calling that shit and I never would have guessed it. It’s sweet, though. A band like us, it should be a total sausage-fest at our gigs.”

Speaking of the band’s audience, it was my bravewords.com duty to ask Taylor about his band’s credibility in extreme metal circles. With a sound that most certainly has a death metal influence, Slipknot is arguably the heaviest band to infiltrate the mainstream in such a big way (arguably: I’m thinking Far Beyond Driven-era Pantera), but most underground-dwellers I know don’t want to acknowledge Taylor’s band as anything other than a nu-metal or mainstream band not worthy of any credibility - does that ever bum the band out?

“I don’t know, man. I know it bums out some of the guys in the band. But the way I look at it, we have our own niche. We have respect from all the bands who those death metal people listen to. When it’s coming from the source, who really gives a shit? Respect is respect; so what? You like what you like. I can’t fault people for not digging us; I can’t fault people for having a misconception about us, because hey, maybe that’s what they really believe.”
“At the end of the day, I’m happy doing this,” he continues. “I’m happy making this music. If I worried about the people who don’t like it, I’d be a miserable prick. I’d rather worry about and care about the opinions of people who actually really enjoy our music than give three-fifths of a fuck about people who don’t. And I think that’s why we’re as popular as we are—we don’t rally to get the people who couldn’t give a shit. We care about the people who do give a shit. That’s why we go above and beyond for our fans, because they get it. If you don’t get it, then there’s really no need for you to show up to our gig in the first place.”

And to close things off, a quick update on all other things musical going on in Taylor’s life, which includes the next Stone Sour disc and a much-rumoured solo disc…

“I put the solo thing on hold for now; I’m doing some gigs here and there. Right now we’re doing some writing for a Stone Sour album. We’ll probably do pre-production in the winter. We had a meeting four or five months ago; I’d been talking about it and really wanting to do a solo album which would be completely different from both bands. We just decided it would make more sense to do a Stone Sour album first. We’d done a lot of work on the Come What(ever) May tour and had a lot of success and really feel like we’ve built a core fanbase now and I know a lot of people are really looking forward to another Stone Sour album. So it just makes more sense to get together with the guys and make a really great album before I start worrying about a solo thing, which people probably wouldn’t dig anyway (laughs).”