Slipknot - Crowz (1997)

In 1991 drummer Joey Jordison founded a thrash metal band called Modifidious, adding local guitarist Craig Jones after their original one left to join the more well known Atomic Opera. Another drummer, Shawn Crahan, also formed his own band Heads On The Wall, playing funk metal cover songs at clubs and releasing a demo tape in July 1992. A fourth Des Moines band called Vexx played death metal with Anders Colsefni on drums, Paul Gray on bass, and Josh Brainard on guitar and vocals, with Colsefni later taking over vocal duties, and all these bands met up at The Runway club and often jammed together. By 1995, Crahan and Gray had started a band named the Pale Ones, adding vocalist Colsefni and guitarist Donnie Steele, and not long after their inception, Gray invited Jordison to a rehearsal because the band was interested in experimenting with additional drum elements. In late 1995, Jordison suggested changing the band name to Slipknot after their song of the same name, and in December they began recording material at SR Audio in their hometown, financing it themselves to the tune of $40,000. In February 1996, guitarist Donnie Steele, a Christian, left Slipknot after discussions regarding the band's lyrics with the producer, Sean McMahon, and Mick Thomson was brought in as the replacement guitarist. After a complicated time with mixing and mastering, the band self-released 'Mate. Feed. Kill. Repeat.' on Halloween 1996, receiving a small amount of airplay on local radio stations off the back of the demo, but no interest from record labels. The band returned to the studio to develop new material, and it was at this time that they sought more melodic vocals for their music, and as a result, Corey Taylor was recruited from fellow Des Moines band Stone Sour, relegating Colsefni to backing vocals and percussion, with him eventually leaving in September 1997. The gap on percussion was filled by Greg Welts, and in early 1998 the band produced a second five-track demo tape exclusively for record labels, although they had been recording throughout 1997 with both Colsefni and Taylor on vocals. 

The band began to receive a lot of attention from record labels, and in February 1998, producer Ross Robinson offered to produce their debut album after attending rehearsals in Des Moines, and in late June Slipknot received a $500,000, seven-album deal from Roadrunner Records. Over the years the 1997 demos have been bootlegged, with the 11 track tape with Colsefni earning the name of 'The Gold Disc', due to the colour of the CD that it was pressed on, and the similarly titled 'The Silver Disc' having eight tracks with Taylor on vocals, some of which were sung on top of the Colsefni tracks after his were removed. Some of these recordings have also turned up on bootlegs with the title 'Crowz', which was a word coined by Joey Jordison as an inside joke in October 1995. The band later wrote 'Crowz' on various demos and papers, and even including it in 'Dogfish Rising' on 'Mate. Feed. Kill. Repeat.', with some people even thinking that it was the title of Slipknot's supposedly scrapped sophomore album. Nowadays, 'Crowz' is generally used as an umbrella term by fans to refer to that era of Slipknot and the songs they produced prior to signing to Roadrunner, and so it's the perfect title for this album, which takes the best tracks from the Gold and Silver discs, to get a very real feel of the emergence of the band at a time where they were in the middle or major line-up changes. This mix of Colsefni's and Taylor's vocals show the more melodic sound that they were aiming for when they recruited the latter, particularly on 'Me Inside', where I've included takes by both of them. I know that Slipknot are very much an acquired taste, and probably won't appeal to a lot of visitors, but I do like a bit of nu-metal now and then, and you can't deny that this band are one of the best of the genre.   

Track listing

01 SlipKnot / Gently (Colsefni demo)
02 Coleslaw (Colsefni demo)
03 Carve (Colsefni demo)
04 Prosthetics (Taylor demo)
05 Do Nothing / Bitchslap (Colsefni demo)
06 Me Inside (Taylor demo)
07 Tattered And Torn (Colsefni demo)
08 Only One (Taylor demo)
09 Gently (Taylor demo)
10 Interloper ('Apple Of My Eyes' demo)
11 Wait And Bleed (demo)
12 The Me Inside (Colsefni demo)
13 Snap (early version)
14 Hate (Taylor demo of old Stone Sour song)