IN REVIEW: Stone Sour - "Hydrograd"

When looking for clues as to what brought Stone Sour from the cinematic and intensely creative House of Gold & Bones double album to the riff-infested throwback Hydrograd, one needs look no further than the pair of covers EPs they released in 2015. The ten songs given the Stone Sour treatment put Corey Taylor's love of classic rock, classic metal and classic grunge to tape, and the performances were as faithful as can be expected by anyone who's killed a couple of hours on YouTube watching Taylor do covers live.

Those covers were done a little too safely and carefully to make them stand out in any significant way, but they were a suitable initiation for new guitarist Christian Martucci, and the band sounded like they were having a blast going through the classics; that spirit flows through Hydrograd as well, as does the presence of Martucci (in the liner notes nicknamed "Tooch"), with an abundance of guitar solos that hearken back to the glory days of hard rock. Throw in some of the biggest choruses Taylor has ever been responsible for (plus those gang vocals!), and Hydrograd starts to feel like a relic from a lost time, and a record that stood a much better chance of smashing in 1987 than it does in 2017.

That said, assuming people still like hard rock, there's no shortage of hit potential on Hydrograd; current single Song #3 is exactly the kind of melodic that makes Slipknot fans turn their noses up at Stone Sour and hit-starved rock radio programmers start frothing from the mouth. Massive hooks work their way through many songs, and I can hear about a half dozen singles waiting in the wings. There's even legit crossover potential in St. Marie; its presence as an acoustic ballad feels like a prerequisite given the throwback nature of the album, but anyone going in expecting a sequel to Bother, the band's first crossover in 2002, might be in for a bit of a shock.

Hydrograd runs a bit long (its intro and 14 songs clock in at over 65 minutes), and I can't help but cringe at some of those titles (Taipei Person/Allah Tea?), but the spirit of what they're trying to accomplish outweighs the execution overall. Its rollout was tarnished somewhat by an ill-informed beef with Nickelback, but Hydrograd offers plenty of old school thrills and a few undeniably catchy moments. Like one of those Hollywood reboots that feels doomed but improbably works, it's a modern update on a dated aesthetic that is faithful to the source material but not the lifestyle. It's a cock rock album without the excess and the misogyny and, while that might be a deal breaker for some, it is far more fun and palatable than it perhaps has any right to be.

June 30, 2017 • Roadrunner
Highlights Song #3 • The Witness Trees • Mercy