Dressed in boiler suits and horror masks, nu-metallers Slipknot don't exactly encourage people to take them seriously. That's just as well, since their actual music is pretty dreadful and this album is exactly the kind of thing that gives modern rock a bad name. Iowa sounds like a deluge of whiny, self-pitying thrash-metal, filled with empty slogans and devoid of any kind of pop sensibility whatsoever. It's obviously designed to shock and it does - in the sense of being so shockingly hamfisted that it sounds like a pastiche. Strictly for tantrum-throwing teenagers only.