There’s a moment about two-and-a-half minutes into “Nihilism”, the song that sits dead center on the tracklist of Vended’s self-titled debut, where the Iowa group locks into a beloved nu metal trope–that one where the band drops down into a seething build and the singer starts repeating a line with increasing intensity until they finally hit the Go button as one and the whole room starts bouncing along to “Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me” or “Knick-knack paddy whack give a dog a bone” –only in Vended’s version, the refrain goes “Shut up, get the fuck inside!”
As someone who grew up in a neighborhood where, as soon as 6pm rolled around on a summer night, you could hear parents up and down the street yelling that exact kind of shit into the magic hour light, I couldn’t help it; my immediate reaction was to picture Griffin Taylor’s dad, Slipknot’s own Corey Taylor, leaning out of a front door, nu metalling the kid inside for supper for the tenth goddamned time. And, to be completely honest, this wasn’t the only time I couldn’t avoid thoughts of a dad or two.
See, Vended contains not one but two Slipknot offspring–in addition to Taylor, drummer Simon Crahan is the son of Shawn “Clown” Crahan, the long-time keg-beating percussionist for that world-conquering band. It’s always a bit of a double-edged sword for the kids of famous musicians when they get their turn under the lights. Upsides? You come pre-loaded with lore, a sure-fire attention-grabber at a time when focus lasts roughly the length of a reel. Downsides? Well... we know. For every Jeff Buckley there are a dozen Sean Lennons, and, if that weren’t enough, it’s always going to be harder to transcend the narrative if you are perceived to be, let’s say, moshing in the same pit as mom or dad. Now imagine your parents just so happen to be era-defining icons, sitting right up there on the Mt. Rushmore of the very genre you’ve chosen to make your play in. Is it then better or worse if you sound more or less exactly like them?
Vended opens with an ambient intro of the “What if my copy of Silent Hill 3 itself had a nightmare?” genre of ambient intros, a move I’m always in favor of as a kind of establishing shot (how else would I know the record’s set in Iowa?). The evil factory-plus-evil radio static soundscape builds ominous pressure before unzipping itself to allow lead-off proper “Paint the Skin” to spill out like a pile of sheep guts. “Paint the Skin” goes hard; fundamentally a death metal song, from the downed-power-line guitar attack from guitarists Cole Espeland and Connor Grodzicki to Crahan’s double-bass rolls to the mosh-groove half-time bridge, it gets its passport stamped for the nu metal side of the border pretty much entirely off that little clean-sung coda half-buried in the mix and a lyric sheet full of self-loathing, signaling that the misery here is grounded entirely in the nu metal personal rather than the death metal conceptual.
Immediately following is “The Far Side”, the record’s most immediate (and maybe most telling) song. “The Far Side” starts with a beautifully structured build; the way that repeating guitar figure provides a bed for Crahan’s drums to pattern out the stages of the intro (and check out that beat switch!) loads so much kinetic drama into the first verse makes it a master class in how to write the kind of lead-in that had kids destroying their living rooms during MTV’s reign. The verse has all the brutality that “Paint the Skin” promises is in the toolbag, but when the clean-sung chorus hits, you see the bigger picture–Vended may be transmitting from a haunted Iowan barn, but the signal is built for the Jumbotron.
As impressive as this is, this is kind of where the questions start for me. Because there’s no getting away from it–as hard as “Paint the Skin” goes, if you’re at all familiar with what Slipknot sound like, the first thing that’s going to hit you is “holy shit, this kid sounds exactly like his dad”, quickly followed by “holy shit, this band sounds exactly like their dads’ band”. To be clear, this didn’t impede my listening experience–but it couldn’t help but complicate it. In truth, Vended is an incredibly accomplished debut. There aren’t any weak tracks. “Am I The Only One” has a great jangling bassline from bassist Jeremiah Pugh in the intro and the most fist-pumping chorus on the record, with Taylor’s gouging vocal echoed by his own harmonizing cleans, setting up a kind of call-and-response that cuts the song with light like a shot of sunset through black clouds. “Serenity” has that same grime and gold touch, while tracks like “Pitiful” and “Nihilism” are pure carnage of the kind that in 1999 turned a generation of kids who thought it couldn’t get heavier than Korn into absolute monsters. The songcraft here is expertly calibrated to evoke maximum drama and catharsis, and the performances meet that level with an effortlessness that makes the record feel like a third or fourth (more on this later), with a special shoutout to a standout drum performance from Crahan that’s so good it’s essentially the co-lead of the album. Crahan consistently makes beats more interesting than they need to be, and, maybe even more crucially in this context, his drumming rushes the band in a way that contains shades of Joey Jordison’s superlative work. The record also just sounds incredible–another element that pushes things over the nu metal side of the tracks. Produced by Chris Collier, who also helmed the boards for Korn’s 2022 album Requiem, the record gleams like a blade without sacrificing an ounce of meat, and contains some subtle layers, like the echo on Taylor’s harmonies across the record, that give the events a touch of drama without endangering the intensity of the overall vibe.
Which is why, after a few listens, the Jumbotron calibration of this record starts to feel more and more telling. The cheapest shot in the book you could make would be to call Vended the best Slipknot record since Vol. 3: The Subliminal Verses. I’m not going to do that–although in many ways this young crew have earned the compliment, much as the old one should be proud to hear it. But there would be some accidental truth in there, too. Vended seemingly have it all, already–but it seems to be in service of a sound that isn’t so much theirs by invention as it is by seeming birthright. Because as a debut Vended is more Vol. 3 than it is Slipknot (1999). Somehow, in arriving in their fathers’ shoes, Vended have skipped over the nearly uncontainable, starved froth of their elders’ beginnings and landed on third base, so to speak, with all the gleaming production and rafter-scraping choruses fully-formed. It’s not that it feels unearned, exactly, because these guys can really do it. It’s more that it brings this unintentional layer of pathos to the listen that I’m still struggling to reconcile. See, Griffin Taylor’s vocals not only possess all of the compressed fury of the elder Taylor’s, but the fact that his lyrics are so deeply reminiscent of Corey Taylor’s makes listening to Vended a little uncanny, the way watching Sublime fronted by Jakob Nowell feels like something that you shouldn’t quite look directly at. Griffin Taylor can’t do much about the timbre of the voice he was born with–but his phrasing, the way he clenches as he builds to each cathartic breakdown; that shit is learned. Which then forces an uncomfortable consideration of the written content of these songs. Slipknot was far from the only nu metal band to use the genre’s unique cathartic qualities to exorcize demons, and the genre has always been predicated on the assumption that the “performance” is in the costumes and on the instruments while the words comes straight from the soul. If Vended were just another nu metal band inspired by the greats in 2024, we could assume they came to the genre for a reason. But if we give the younger Taylor the benefit of the doubt and assume these lyrics are an authentic expression of what’s within as opposed to just an attempt to play by the rules of the genre, then the son is seemingly just as deeply wounded as the father. There’s something about this that makes these lines more upsetting than they would be coming from another nu metal band with a deadly bounce and a devastated inner child. “You created me to believe/That the world was a fucked-up disease” Taylor seethes on “Disparager”. On “Pitiful”, the chorus goes “How did I get here?/How do I leave?/I see the exit, but I’ve consumed the fucking key”. On “Serenity” he states “I just want to feel alive again”.
Maybe it’s because we’ve spent the past 25 years with Corey Taylor’s words, watching him and his band struggle with their own demons as they both summit the world’s biggest stages and record broken confessions from lonely cars, that we naturally have come to hope that, on some level, the blood shed on stage and on wax has represented a kind of baptism that has washed these men clean and sent them home to raise the happiest of families. It’s like a reminder that none of us can ever truly save our kids from any of it–that they’re going to have to pick up what work we’ve done, for ourselves and them, and carry it on as best they can.
So, in that sense, maybe it’s appropriate that Vended’s first record sounds like this. It truly kicks a lot of ass. But for their sake as much as ours, I hope the next one shows a step beyond their father’s backyards, one that takes them in a freer direction. God knows they’ve got all the talent they could ever need, and that’s something their dads can only take so much credit for.
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