Riff Police! Pull Over! #160: Emmure Vs KoRn!

Celebrating the first anniversary of their album “Hindsight“, Deathcore collective Emmure unveiled a previously unreleased track entitled “Sons of Medusa“, a short, sharp and brutally heavy number that was originally planned to serve as the introduction piece for the album, their second with guitarist Joshua Travis and drummer Josh Miller and first with bassist  Nicholas Pyatt. We could wax lyrical about the controversy that has surrounded Frankie Palmeri and his band pretty much since they started out in 2003 particularly as we consider ourselves fans but this is Riff Police! So let’s skip the bulls*** and get to straight to the point. Back in 1998 the third record from Nu-Metal influencers and Bakersfield boys KoRn landed on Planet Metal, something of a genre moment with the huge single “Freak On A Leash“. Upon that record is one called “Justin“, about a boy named Justin who was dying of intestinal cancer. His last wish was to meet the members of KoRn. This lead frontman Jonathan Davis to ink the lyrics around his thoughts: “It really freaked me out. That threw a whole bunch of new kind of pressures on my head. That’s really intense. Someone’s gonna die and his last thing he wants to do is come hang out with us. So I truly just freaked out. It’s like why would you want to meet me? What makes me so special?“. Check out the riff from combination Brian “Head” Welch and James “Munky” Shaffer and compare it to the one of Joshua Travis? Similarities are the last thing you might expect…