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By GREG MAKI
About six years ago, Saliva rode the nü-metal wave to success with the hit singles “Your Disease” and “Click Click Boom” from their second album, Every Six Seconds. On Back into Your System, the follow-up released the next year, the Memphis quintet refined their sound, diversifying by mixing in a Southern rock influence. By the time they got to 2004’s Survival of the Sickest, the rapping had disappeared completely, and the change led the band to its strongest album, a loving, attitude-filled ode to Mötley Crüe-style party rock. Unfortunately, it came and went with little fanfare, failing to reach the heights of the previous two releases, both of which were certified Gold (500,000 copies sold).
The band took longer than usual to regroup. Frontman Josey Scott ventured into acting, while guitarist Chris D’Abaldo announced he had left the band, retracted that statement, then left again. Perhaps seeking to rekindle their former glory, the four remaining members turned once again to Bob Marlette, the producer of their two hit albums. As producer, mixer, engineer and co-writer of all 10 songs, his fingerprints are all over their latest effort, Blood Stained Love Story.
The result is a wildly unfocused album that features Saliva at its best and, more often, worst. The disc begins in dramatic fashion with the first single, “Ladies and Gentlemen.” Its spoken verses and rollicking chorus show more invention than the other nine tracks combined. It feels like the introduction to a great piece of work as Scott boasts of something “like nothing you’ve ever seen before.” To say that this promise goes unfulfilled is an understatement. Scott returns to rapping on “King of the Stereo” and “One More Chance,” while the band plays without a hint of intensity. The guitar solos that were so essential to Survival of the Sickest are mostly absent; those that made the cut are merely cosmetic. Many of the songs are bulked up by unnecessary electronic loops.
The band has taken a colossal step back, delivering an album of nondescript radio-friendly tunes. Scott has gone from singing about a “rock n’ roll revolution” and spitting wicked barbs at Nickelback and Default to asking, “Why can’t I be normal like everyone else?” on “Going Under,” one of Blood Stained Love Story’s many ballads and a song that bears a disturbing resemblance to something you might hear from REM . The poppy, upbeat “Twister” is an embarrassment. But then it’s followed by “Black Sheep,” the heaviest song the band has ever recorded and a reminder that they are the same guys you heard about a half-hour earlier on “Ladies and Gentlemen.” It’s hard, though, to believe Scott as he proclaims himself “an outlaw straight from birth” and “the black sheep of the family” when you’ve just heard the sickeningly sunny “Twister.”
If you purchase the album from Best Buy, you get a second disc with two bonus tracks. Die-hard Saliva fans—I suspect there may be fewer of them after they hear this new batch of tunes—will want this version. Anyone else would be better off downloading “Ladies and Gentlemen” and “Black Sheep,” then blasting Survival of the Sickest to remind them of who Saliva used to be. |
