Mushroomhead - The Righteous And The Butterfly

So I finally took the plunge and came around to dealing with this record. *Deep breath*

After the absolute stink-fest of Saviour Sorrow and the suicide-inducing snooze-fest of Beautiful Stories For Ugly Children, I had all but given up hope on Mushroomhead. Then I heard J Mann would be guesting on the latest record. And then I heard that the plan to collaborate had been scrapped and J Mann had returned permanently. Fuck! And then, finally, this album dropped. I pretty much went about doing everything in my power to try and ignore it, until I started reading about how this new shit is gonna please all the old fans; how the band have brought back so much of their old-school vibe. It wasn't just band interviews; fans on forums, Facebook and the landfill that is Youtube's comments section also chipped in ecstatically that this was the case.

So I listened. Yes, there is heaps of old school Mushroomhead in this. Fucking heaps! The keyboards take on a more carnival vibe, and there's even rapping again, for fuck sake! I can't tell you how awesome it is to hear rapping in metal music again (never thought I'd say that). There's a few trying-too-hard-to-be-part-of-the-8-string-crowd tracks which do absolutely nothing for me, and if I'm honest I was enormously surprised at how shit this record isn't (I'm not counting the Adele cover with a dubstep drop in the chorus - I'm just going to blot that out of existence).

But - and it's a big but - jesus chriiiiiist this shit is a mess. J Mann rejoined, but Waylon also remained. I mean no disrespect to any of the vocalists for Mushroomhead, because they are all amazing, but there simply isn't enough room here for three of them. It doesn't help that when Waylon is screaming, he sounds almost identical to Mann. The whole thing that made Mushroomhead work was the unique dynamic between J Mann's lows and Jeffery Nothing's extremely identifiable voice. Waylon is a phenomenal frontman, boasting a veritable arsenal of vocal styles, but there just isn't room on these quirky three or four minuters for three seperate vocalists. Throw in vocal appearances from Skinny's new girlfriend and 10,000 Cadillac's Jus Mic, and everybody is literally fighting for space to spit. It's ridiculous, to be frank.

Nevertheless, I believe that The Righteous And The Butterfly is a step in the right direction for a phenomenally talented band that has been wasting itself on boring redneck metal for nearly a decade. TL;DR version - a million times better than both previous stinkers combined, but still a bit of a mess.

But you gotta admit they still look cool as shit - probably cooler looking than ever, actually.

Mushroomhead - Mushroomhead

We are about to take you into the world of the LSD user...

I've been on a bit of a nostalgia trip recently so I've been spinning this record an awful lot. When I was 12, life was all about Slipknot and Mushroomhead. Mushroomhead, despite having some dud album releases in the last decade or so, remain one of my favourite bands ever. I picked up XX on the strength of the band's image alone, fell in love with their music and spent the next year or so frantically hunting down the band's Cleveland-only released first three albums and two remix albums. I managed to hunt down their second album, Superbuick, on eBay, but the other two records were incredibly difficult to find, especially their third album, M3.

Then one day I saw one of those shitty ads in the back of K! magazine for companies that 'specialize' in 'rare' releases, who had Mushroomhead's first album in stock for £25. So after convincing my parents to 'lend' me £25, we rang them up. They had unfortunately already sold their one copy of Mushroomhead's self-titled, but perhaps rather unethically, offered to copy the CD for me before they posted it out to the original buyer. Despite this being really dodgy, coming from a legit CD wholesaler, I really wanted to hear that album, so the copy it was. I have since gotten a real copy (the repress on Filthy Hands) and even contemplated a real original, but have always dropped out at the last minute, unwilling to pay rediculous eBay prices. I went on to procure copies of all of Mushroomhead's self-released records (barring Remix 1997, which is basically a crappier Remix 2000), but all of them were Filthy Hands represses, apart from Superbuick.

In the face of adversaries who like to put Mushroomhead down, the usual weapon I've had to defend myself against is the statement that "Mushroomhead are just a bad Mike Patton impressionist band, man, they've never done anything original!". And yes, whilst Jeffery Nothing does bear resemblance to Mike Patton's Faith No More vocal performances, it wasn't until I got into Mr. Bungle a few years back that I realized how many similarities Mushroomhead owe to them. If you take the jazz and funk elements out of Mr. Bungle and replace them with truckloads of Twin Peaks samples, you've got the first Mushroomhead album.

This album is, in all honesty, all over the place. It is a total shambles from start to finish. The songs don't really flow, and they are often meshed awkwardly together with bad movie samples or crappy piano interludes. Despite introducing the world to the dynamic duo of Nothing 'n' J Mann, this is primarily a Nothing-led record. J Mann only solos one track to himself (the excellent "Ego Tripp"), backs up Jeff on the rest and is absent from 8 of the album's 14 tracks. But saying that, 6 of the albums tracks are devoid of either vocalist's contributions. To confuse matters further, there's a guest vocalist on the creepy-as-shit "Mommy".

Mushroomhead's self-titled was a strange debut into the band's psychedelic, multi-directional approach. The band's style, whilst unique, relies extremely heavily on external media and influences. I don't believe it was until the release of Superbuick and M3 that Mushroomhead really began to carve their own special take on things. My favourite tracks on this CD are "Slow Thing", "Elevation", "Ego Tripp", "Indifferent" and "Simpleton". I'd add "43" to that list, but the re-recorded version for XX is phenomenally better than this one, even if this one has a sample of Windom Earle laughing over the start of it, which is a nice touch.

If you liked Mr. Bungle but the ten-minute songs and the endless time changes got on your nerves: listen to this. If you liked XX and hated the direction the band went in afterwards, and aren't afraid of a slight drop in recording quality: listen to this. If you love Twin Peaks, Mike Patton and nu-metal, and have never heard Mushroomhead before: please, please, please listen to this.

You can now get your lugholes around any of the original Mushroomhead self-released CDs on Spotify, but here's a Youtube link anyway. Enjoy!

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! 

10,000 Cadillacs - Be My Guide

Please excuse the image quality on this post. 

This is solo hip hop effort by Mushroomhead's drummer Skinny and ex-vocalist J Mann. Being a fan of all things Mushroomhead in my early teens, I naturally began hunting down physical copies of side-project albums when I found out about the existence of Discogs a few years back. I started with 10,000 Cadillacs because I love J Mann and also have quite the penchant for rap music, as I'm sure some of you are aware.

What I actually make of this record however, I'm not sure. Be My Guide is 90s hip hop to the max. The production is all bass and treble with no middle, and the gospel-esque female vocals are nothing short of terrifyingly awful. The record starts off on a bum note; "Ruggish n' Raw" is useless, and I can't for the life of me make out a goddamn word J Mann is saying. It doesn't get much better, but I think you gotta take a lot of rap music with a pinch of salt, and with that thinking, Be My Guide becomes one of those albums that is so bad that it is just brilliant.

"Exercize In True Love" first comes on as a cringe-worthy serious-fest amongst all the other tracks, but when you actually pick the track apart and see what Mann is on about, it's a goddamn good song. This was self-released by the group back in the day. After many years of inactivity, 10,000 Cadillacs is once again active today. I just hope they bring out another record! (Oh, and by the way, rap belongs on vinyl folks!)

Get Gone!!!