Too Many Mornings

Slipknot's new album takes an alternative musical look at Christmas.

Des Moines, Iowa – Doom rockers Slipknot release their first Christmas album today—just in time for last-minute holiday shoppers.

Titled Adeste Infideles: All Hope Is Gone, the long-awaited CD features 13 tracks by the heavy-metal band, including imaginative but twisted re-workings of traditional holiday favorites. In early reviews, the top-secret project’s all-out frontal assault on Christmas has stunned critics and delighted fans of Slipknot’s sound, which is often described as death-metal music.

“The quality of the ruthlessness and sustained physical exertion on Slipknot’s fifth studio release is breathtaking,” Rolling Stone Magazine critic David Fricke says. “Take their re-working of the old standard White Christmas, for example. Lead singer Corey Taylor manages to insert the words ‘shit’ and ‘fuck’ into Irving Berlin’s classic ballad no less than 17 times, brilliantly transforming it from a sentimental, post-World War II reminiscence into a black tornado of bloodcurdling rage that perfectly captures post-9/11 teenage angst.”

“Our new album is gonna shock the fuck out of people,” Taylor tells Fricke in Rolling Stone’s December issue. “I’m so fucking excited about it! This song is not only about my utter disgust for America’s favorite holiday, but even more about the people who mindlessly celebrate the crass commercialism that has become the main expression of their misplaced faith in the so-called child of God.”

The new Slipknot CD features an unusually dramatic cover for a Christmas release. Produced by Roadrunner Records, the same company behind Nickelback and Killswitch Engage, the cover is jet black except for the title, which is emblazoned in bright red in Old English type near the top. The center of the cover features an image of a withered poinsettia set inside a silvery, inverted Satanic star eerily lit by orange and yellow flames. The ghoulish imagery is rivaled only by the album’s outrageous interpretations of holiday favorites, including:

1. Jangle Balls

2. O Cum, All Ye Faithless

3. Rudolph, the Neo-Nazi Reindeer

4. I Saw Manny Mounting Santa Claus

5. Adeste Infideles (title track)

6. It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Gehenna

7. Silent Fucking Night

8. Christmas Cannon

9. Fuckin’ Around the Christmas Tree

10. It’s the Most Sickening Time of the Year

11. Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let’s Do Blow!

12. God Unrest Ye Deadly Gentlemen

13. Shit White Fucking Christmas

Bob Dylan's new Christmas album is not at all like Slipknot's new Christmas album.

Taylor said a portion of the album’s proceeds will benefit the Church of Satan, which was founded by satanist Anton Levay in 1966 on the pagan holiday Walpurgisnacht. Levay, the controversial author of The Satanic Bible, officially died on Halloween day in 1997 at the age of 67. His children—Satan Xerxes Carnacki LaVey, Karla LaVey and Zeena Galatea Schreck—are said to be huge fans of Slipknot, as well as other musical acts that promote the black arts, ranging from Ozzy Osbourne and Rammstein to Judas Priest and Barry Manilow.

Rumors about Slipknot’s mysterious Christmas album had circulated among the band’s loyal fans for several years. Snippets of some tracks reportedly were overheard backstage last summer when the band was on tour, though nothing ever got leaked onto a bootleg recording or the Internet.

But according to reports that surfaced last year in Billboard Magazine, the band’s twisted Christmas album was a pet project forSlipknot and its marketers. It had no official title, and was simply referred to by industry insiders as the Black & Red album, in what was believed to be a sly nod to the Beatles’ infamous White Album and Prince’s Black Album.

Slipknot isn’t the first band to surprise its fans with an unexpected Christmas album this year. This fall, for example, folk rocker Bob Dylan released his much-anticipated take on Christmas, Christmas in the Heart. Proceeds from his somewhat more traditional album benefit the World Food Programme.

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