Issues

1	Dead 1:12
2	Falling Away from Me 4:30
3	Trash 3:27
4	4 U 1:42
5	Beg for Me 3:53
6	Make Me Bad 3:55
7	It's Gonna Go Away 1:30
8	Wake Up 4:08
9	Am I Going Crazy 0:58
10	Hey Daddy 3:44
11	Somebody Someone 3:47
12	No Way 4:08
13	Let's Get This Party Started 3:41
14	Wish You Could Be Me 1:07
15	Counting 3:38
16	Dirty 7:50

Barnes & Noble

Korn is the art-scarred older brother to Limp Bizkit's spoiled detention-hall wiseass. If Fred Durst is the high-school tool with the sickest jokes in the locker room, Korn yowler Jonathon Davis is the spooky darksider getting stoned alone in the parking lot. "Why do I have a conscience/All it does is fuck with me," he sings above the goth-metal whomp of "Trash," setting the tone for his band's fourth album -- a psycho-sludge epic that makes the Bizkits' SIGNIFICANT OTHER read like BRIDGE OVER TROUBLED WATER. Davis has a gift for turning the rap-talk vox Anthony Kiedis ripped off from George Clinton into a testosterone bawl all his own, and at times he sounds like a freakish force of nature fronting musicians who've rebuilt Nine Inch Nails's industrial monster-mash into a sleek '90s metal machine. When he bellows "Wake the fuck up!" over Reginald "Fieldy Snuts" Arvizu's metaloid bass slamming, David Silveria's sludge-hop beats, and Brian "Head" Welch and James "Munky" Shaffer's tidal guitar textures, the combined impact could blow the roof off just about any mothersucker in the land. Equally striking in their deranged drive are songs like "Am I Going Crazy" and "Let's Get This Party Started," in which Davis's bipolar yammering ("help meeeee!") grimly articulates the narcissistic hell of disaffected teendom with a visceral angst that far surpasses boomer totems like THE CATCHER IN THE RYE or detached "song-poets" like Paul Westerberg. And the fact that millions of suburban teens hear it as generational folk music only drives home the point more powerfully. Jon Dolan

All Music Guide

Released in the fall of 1999, when Korn were in danger of being overshadowed by such protégés as Limp Bizkit, Issues reaffirms the group's status as alt-metal leaders, illustrating that the true difference between Korn and their imitators is their mastery of sound. Korn are about nothing if not sound. Sure, Jonathan Davis doesn't merely toss off lyrics, but in the end, it doesn't matter since his voice and the various words that float to the surface simply enhance the mood. Similarly, the band doesn't really have any distinguished riffs or hooks -- everything each member contributes adds to the overall sound -- so, casual listeners can be forgiven if they think the songs sound the same, since not only do the tracks bleed into one other, the individual songs have no discernible high points. Each cut rises from the same dark sonic murk, occasionally surging forward with volume, power, and aggression. It's mood music -- songs don't matter, but the foreboding feeling and gloomy sounds do. To a certain extent, this has always been true of Korn albums, but it's particularly striking on Issues because they pull off a nifty trick of stripping their sound back to its bare essentials and expanding and rebuilding from that. They've decided to leave rap-metal to the likes of Limp Bizkit, since there is very little rapping or appropriation of hip-hop culture anywhere on Issues. By doing this, they have re-emphasized their skill as a band, and how they can find endless, often intriguing, variations on their core sound. Issues may not be the cathartic blast of anger their debut was, nor is it as adventurous as Follow the Leader, but it better showcases the sheer raw power of the band than either. Stephen Thomas Erlewine