Meaningful Metal

As a kid, he remembers sitting in his underwear in his bedroom on the family farm outside of Pittsburgh, trying to figure out how to play Van Halen's "Hot For Teacher."

Years later, as the drummer in David Lee Roth's solo band, Ray Luzier would open with the song every night during the group's shows.

Since then, Luzier's had plenty of brushes with the big time, having played with Stone Temple Pilots for a bit and Army of Anyone, which featured STP's Robert and Dean DeLeo as well as Filter frontman Richard Patrick.

But none of that really prepared Luzier for his current gig, manning the drum kit in moody metallers Korn.

Though he's been touring with the band since early 2008, Luzier recently made his recording debut with the group on their forthcoming ninth studio disc, "Korn III: Remember Who You Are," due out July 12.

For the disc, Korn reunited with producer Ross Robinson, who oversaw the band's first two records, and who's known for his aggressive, confrontational tactics in the studio.

"If you looked a little too comfortable playing, he wanted to make you uncomfortable. He loved making you squirm," Luzier recalls of working with Robinson. "The first week or so, I was having a hard time with it. I wanted to strangle the guy. He was punching cymbals, kicking stands, screaming. On a couple of tracks on the record, you can actual hear him yelling. He would come up and push my arm on a fill. It was intense. He's a passionate mofo, for sure."

But Robinson's in-your-face demeanor suits Korn well.

The band's self-titled, 1994 debut and its 1996 follow-up, "Life Is Peachy," were emotionally raw and cathartic outbursts of pent-up energy, with frontman Jonathan Davis getting so worked up, you can actually hear him breaking down into tears at one point on "Daddy," from Korn's first disc, where he recalls his childhood molestation.

As a genre, heavy metal has long been posited on machismo, but Korn veered away from all that early on in the band's career, with Davis singing about getting picked on as a kid and displaying a vulnerability not often seen amongst his peers.

And Robinson was the guy who really brought it out of the group, focusing as much on emotions as sonics, which continued on "Korn III."

"He didn't care about the instruments in front of us," Luzier says. "We'd literally have speeches, like 15 minutes before we laid down a track, like, why are we there? What are we bringing? What are we giving? Not like, 'Hey, let's double this chorus.' It wasn't about that.

"Most producers are always worried about the song," he continues. "He was like, 'Let's bring out our hearts.' "

Robinson's presence is palpable on the disc, which is an about-face from Korn's recent records.

With the departure of guitarist Brian "Head" Welch prior to the band's commencing work on 2005's "See You on the Other Side," the group worked with a variety of outside songwriters on that disc and 2007's "Untitled," resulting in a pair of diffuse, scattershot albums that pushed the bounds of the group's sound with an increased emphasis on electronic flourishes and elaborate production techniques.

Both records rank among Korn's least effective.

But "Korn III" has a much more stripped down, organic feel to it. It doesn't sound like a regression, so much as a band rediscovering its original reason for being.

"My heart feels free form the past," Davis sings on the album's first single, "Oildale," but when it comes to these dudes, it's that past that's reignited the present.

"It's not like we're going back and trying to be like the first two records," Luzier clarifies. "It's just, the whole way of making it, it's like going back to the days when they were hungry in a little garage in Bakersfield, just playing from the heart. If there's a mistake on the record, oh well, we're humans. And that's what it's all about."

Contact reporter Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@ reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476.