Stone Sour
Audio Secrecy

It's time for the Stone Sour to return as well; the band, no longer secondary to Corey Taylor, comes back four years after the good "Come What(ever) May" with the new "Audio Secrecy." To get right to the point, I will say right away that this new work doesn't bring anything particularly new to the Sour style of recent times, with a Corey Taylor in good shape who now has total control of the scene both with them and with his more famous adventure companions, Slipknot.

The point that can be made from the start is that unlike the past, this is not a fundamentally Nu Metal album, but a more melodic Hard Rock that well accompanies the voice of the Iowa frontman and forms the basis of the majority of the tracks. It must be said that for nostalgics, ballads like "Dying" and "Imperfect" may be hard to digest; the past has accustomed us to the 'knot's number 8 grappling with soft melodies, I think of "Bother," "Through Glass," "Snuff," and "Vermillion pt.2," but in this work, the 'easy listening' vein perhaps takes over a bit too much.

Also present are grunge influences and ' alt. rock ' as in the energetic "Let's Be Honest" and "Hate Not Gone," enjoyable and adrenaline-pumping, even though the guitars and drums rotate, as mentioned, around a modern rock that I like to call 'made in USA' (given the trends of the moment) rather than Metal. Moreover, noteworthy is the increasingly absent scream singing by Taylor, who has chosen almost exclusively to sing in 'clean,' something unthinkable if one were to listen to an album like "Iowa."

The album for now seems to be driven by the lead single, I would daringly say, not with disdain 'in the style of Bon Jovi,' "Say You'll Haunt Me," among the most successful tracks on the album and overall gives a good general idea of the album. After years, surely something more could have been expected, but Taylor's choices seem to have taken over. We await a return with Slipknot which at this point really arouses curiosity, not just because of the death of founding bassist P. Gray, but also because of the commercial paths taken with "Audio Secrecy." Nevertheless, let's enjoy a good album certainly above the averages of the historical period, a fresh, energetic album and I repeat, fundamentally rock.

Key tracks: "Digital (Did You Tell)," "Say You'll Haunt Me," "Hesitate," "Anna".

Rating 7.