Mushroomhead - Savior Sorrow

When Mushroomhead dragged themselves out of the Ohio backwaters onto the international "nu-metal" stage back in 2001, they presented metal fans around the world with a fresh and somewhat confusing sound. Mushroomhead's diversity is what made them so exciting; the infamous live shows, the crazy costumes, the "metal/is it metal?" thing they had going on - not to mention they had managed to sell over 80,000 copies of their first three albums entirely by word of mouth and from touring. It really is a fucking mystery how it took Mushroomhead eight years, three albums and a remix compilation to get signed. When Slipknot etc. exploded in 1999, the band felt that it's image had been stolen, but anyone with even the slightest bit of positive foresight could see that the way was now paved for masked crusaders, and it did not take long for Mushroomhead to rise from local oddities to "fame" on an international scale.

Roll on five years to 2006, and the music industry is done with Mushroomhead. "Nu-metal" collapsed, just like any other trend. If your band didn't have a bunch of black fringes and tight girl jeans you were fucked at any chance of success in metal, unless you could emulate a sound like Killswitch Engage. Mushroomhead were dropped from their major label (Universal), a fact I think they were actually happy about - and it was back to business as usual for the band; self-producing a record and keeping on touring. And then, as a crushing blow to mega-fans such as myself, vocalist J Mann quit the band. Mushroomhead quickly recruited another local performer, Waylon Reavis, as his replacement. In what seemed like no time at all, Mushroomhead were pushing a new album; Savior Sorrow. Holy fuck, I was excited! Despite the sheer pressure against them, one step forward two steps back and all that, the band had followed through and actually made a new album! Only, something was missing. Imagine the following said in the voice of Chris Tucker's character from the Friday movie; "Daaaaaaayum 'Head, you got lazy!"

Savior Sorrow is an absolute ocean of mediocrity: an ocean of bad redneck metal meeting crappy, half-arsed keyboard playing. Did J Mann really hold so much influence over the whole band? Because with him gone....Christ, they fucking suck! The whole dynamic that Mann and second vocalist Nothing shared is what made Mushroomhead, alongside the keyboard / synth driven messes that the band called songs. The keyboards here are stripped back to barely fuck all, as are Nothing's strained melodic wails, placing newcomer Reavis as the apparent focal point, a strange move considering the success of previous record XIII was mostly due to heavier songs led with Nothing's incredible vocal performances. Reavis isn't bad at all, it's just he is the full front-man package; singing, screaming, shouting, growling, and rendering Jeffery Nothing (sadly) useless. If I heard Mushroomhead for the first time with this record, I'd be like "what is the purpose of this other "Nothing" guy? He's better, but why is he even there?"

The band's guitar work has never ever been challenging as the songs were always led by keyboards and bass; the guitars were usually an afterthought, adding much needed punch. With the keyboards stripped back, Mushroomhead's limited chug-chug-chug-chug approach is tremendously fucking grating. Every single fucking bastard cunting song. Chug-chug-chug. Or chugga-chugga-chugga-chug-chug. Chug-chugga-chug-chug-chugga. Fuck me, can these guys actually play a guitar? I'm beginning to doubt it. My final gripe is that whoever mixed this album is a fucking cretin. The sound is paper thin with no low-end whatsoever and some of the vocal effects are excruciatingly high-end on the sound spectrum, causing all manner of unwanted distortion. STAHP. Y U DO DIS, MOSHRUMHED? Y? PLS!

Despite everything, there are a few good songs here. This is Mushroomhead after all, and no matter how awful they have become, they can't help but accidentally churn out something awesome. But that's it. Other than that I cannot shake Savior Sorrow from being the album that ruined my favourite band for me. At the time this dropped I started listening to a whole world of grindcore and death metal, and this just couldn't compare. Somehow, this record was also pressed on vinyl, but there is no fucking way I'm buying it again, ever. If my collection was destroyed in a fire I wouldn't replace Savior Sorrow. In fact, if my copy was destroyed by fire I think the world would be a better place.

By far the best song on the album, and that heavily uses an auto-tune/vocoder device!