Stone Sour – House Of Gold and Bones Part 2

Stone Sour have already made available a full album stream of their upcoming release entitled “House of Gold and Bones Part 2”, the second and final part of their double concept album. The album will be available around the world on April 9, but there is also going to be a comic book version of this, expected to debut on April 17.

The album kicks off rather smoothly with “Red City”; a dark very melodic and escalating track. “Black John” holds a faster tempo and a breath taking guitar riff that I absolutely adore, first to appear around the 2^nd minute and then again after the 3^rd minute in the track. “Sadist” is a slow track with beautiful lyrics my favorite being: “…give me a way to be the agony that knew you all along…”. “Peckinpah” kicks off slow but the pre-chorus reminds me so much of older Slipknot tracks… So much! The fifth track of this album, “Stalemate”, picks up the tempo again and brings in a superb, melodic but very powerful chorus. “Gravesend” is beautifully dark and you’ll hear a nice guitar solo about a minute before the end of the track. “’82” to tell you the truth I didn’t love, but I liked the tempo and it serves well to me as a transitional track for the eighth track of this album entitled “The Uncanny Valley”, which left me speechless particularly because of its soulful lyrics. “Blue Smoke” is a great intro track for “Do Me A Favor” which is definitely my personal favorite; you obviously know this, but I just need to say that I love the tempo, the in your face lyrics and the mind blowing drum work on this! So good! And then you have one of these amazing ballads… I can tell you that “The Conflagration” wouldn’t have had this intensity if it wasn’t sung by Corey Taylor; as simple as that! All this brings us to the title track “House of Gold & Bones”. I always pay too much attention to the lyrics and these are superb! This track definitely serves as a great end to this exciting second part of the album.

Overall this is a very good release and hands down the best of Stone Sour so far! There are many tempo variations throughout the album, the lyrics are breathtaking and it will pretty much kick the sh*t out of you! The music is dark and slightly more complex than in the first part and even though there are themes from part 1 included here as well, they seem to unravel in a magnificent way in part 2. Now is the part where I say “Give it a listen…” but I’m sure you’ll rape the repeat button on this one! Have fun!