Whereas Anna Calvi’s captivating 2011 debut was founded on passionate physicality, the darkly seductive British singer’s followup is haunted by ghosts - not just in several lyrics that seem to be drawn from the deathbed and the afterlife, but in hovering vocals that often transmit an otherworldly chill rather than a hot breath. Whether or not that’s a good thing is up for debate. Basically, High Rise is almost the STP we remember.
But again, the results are inconsistent: Black Heart is instantly accessible, almost familiar, while Cry Cry sounds like it’s doing the robot at an ’80s Eurythmics concert. Musically, High Rise gives us the springy, bass-driven songs we’ve come to expect from STP. But on songs like Same on the Inside, the smoothness is a little much, like a waitress auditioning for American Idol by singing Heart-Shaped Box. Sometimes, like on the EP’s opener, Out of Time, it works.
His recent replacement, Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington, shows the same polish here. In the ’90s, while alt-rock contemporaries were wringing anguish from scabrous vocal cords, Stone Temple Pilots vocalist Scott Weiland exhibited the roughness of a pair of snakeskin shoes. Stone Temple Pilots with Chester Bennington Prey for Me and Love & Meth have the right balance of nu-metal bounce and genuine anguish, sounding like the corpse of a funk band being brought to life with rusty defibrillator paddles, but songs like Lullaby for a Sadist seem formulaic and forced. The downside is overproduced, overworked aggression that sounds less authentic the more processed it becomes, like wolves tearing apart the Pillsbury Doughboy. Is it supposed to be ironic that an album called The Paradigm Shift is a return to a familiar sound for seminal nu-metal band Korn? If you’re a fan of the California group’s most successful albums, you’ll find a lot to like here: the staccato riffs collapsing into E-strings down-tuned into a black hole, the choruses that sound like Bush having an argument with a bass amp, singer Jonathan Davis’s weird death-metal scat. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.