Stone Sour – Audio Secrecy

Three years after the release of “Come What(ever) May”, Stone Sour have released another studio album entitled “Audio Secrecy”. To be perfectly honest, I was more than excited to review an album by this band and expected to be totally overwhelmed by “Audio Secrecy”. Overall, music-wise this album is almost perfect, even though I could live without so many melodic tracks. However, what I expected was slightly harsher vocals – definitely not “Slipknot-harsh”, but you get the idea – and a more up-beat sensation after listening to the entire album.

At the beginning of the album there’s an intro, which is the title-track of “Audio Secrecy”, and which is actually a very slow piano melody, almost a “weird sadistic heartbeat”, as Corey Taylor said, when he described what the band was trying to accomplish by this intro. The idea with the piano-based melody is really good. However, I would prefer this melody to have been more integrated to the rest of the album, because as it is, “Audio Secrecy” hardly grasps the feeling of the album as a whole.

Two tracks I distinguish from this release are “Mission Statement” and “Digital (Did You Tell)”, the vocals of which as you’ll notice as soon as you give the album a listen, provide a more proper support to the music and clean and melodic vocals are limited solely to the chorus. It’s true that many tracks from “Audio Secrecy” strongly remind me of bands like 3 Doors Down, which in some other occasion wouldn’t be necessarily a bad thing. However, in the case of Stone Sour and taking into consideration the “Slipknot-backgroung”, such a simile isn’t good enough!

As far as the lyrics are concerned, to my disappointmet, most tracks from “Audio Secrecy” refer to some unforgotten or even unfulfilled love from the past. It’s as if they’re trying to turn this music into some popular radio-eligible tracks. In an attempt not to be so strict, I’ll leave this up to you; So, you tell me: Is this what you would expect from Stone Sour?

Overall, I would dare to consider this album a “must-have”, solely based on the composition of the tracks, leaving out my arguments on the vocals; Because what I have in my hands is 17 tracks (deluxe edition) of highly innovative music worth listening to.