Review Summary: Screaming Bloody Murder is like a steaming pile of garbage: anyone with a brain larger than a fly’s should be repulsed by it.
Can we please kick things off by discussing the ridiculousness of the album’s title?
Screaming Bloody Murder. Seriously? Nothing about Derrick Whibley’s quivering prepubescent voice suggests that he could ever muster up a sound with more fury than a pissed off mouse. Yet here we are, staring down another post-glory days Sum 41 album with a title even more absurd than the last laughable outing’s: “Underclass Hero.” Whibley and company have never been poster boys for innovation, as even
All Killer No Filler and
Chuck had their share of “where did I just hear that before” moments, but it wasn’t until 2007 that they started trying to make a career out of blatantly ripping off their peers.
Screaming Bloody Murder treks even further down that silly shallow path and, unlike what happened with
Underclass Hero, one can only hope that they won’t come back alive this time.
Because last time they came back with a lot of bad ideas. I mean seriously. There was “Underclass Hero”, which ripped off themselves (Fat Lip), “Walking Disaster”, which sounded like Whibley ripped out Tom Delonge’s vocal chords and had them implanted (for God knows why), let’s see what else…there was the way that “The Jester” completely ripped off of “House of Wolves” by My Chemical Romance, how “With Me” sounded like any Avril Lavigne song, “Best of Me” was like a cover of “Hate Me” by Blue October, and “So Long Goodbye” was “Good Riddance”, and I don’t know every song ever written but it’s a safe bet that all 15 songs on the record were stolen from somebody else. The worst part is that they were stealing from really sh
itty artists like themselves and Simple Plan and My Chemical Romance. I mean f
uck. C’mon. You don’t rob the dump when there is a bank across the street.
So yeah basically this album is Sum 41 recycling their terrible ideas, and it is probably the worst album I have ever heard in my entire life. The instrumentation tries to be all heavy as f
uck, like in
Chuck, and ooh I just rhymed and that is about as good as the lyrics get on here too…but like I was saying the instrumentation is choppy and fails on all fronts. The attempts at balladry are hilarious too, like ‘What Am I To Say’, which sounds like it was written by Avril Lavigne and probably was. ‘Scumf
uck’ sounds like Deryck is trying to nail Matthew Bellamy’s falsetto, or just Matthew Bellamy, but either way Muse is gay now so Deryck might be in luck. The most noticeable downfalls of
Screaming Bloody Vaginas are that 1.) it is not catchy or memorable at any point and 2.) it is way too long. Nobody likes being bothered with a fifty minute punk-rock album that isn’t interesting. I think this album could be good if it was supposed to be funny…like you know what I mean? If Whibley and those other guys in the band were like “Hey that last album really sucked dong, let’s make a parody of it and exaggerate all of its flaws to a ridiculous extent.” The sad thing though is that Sum 41 is completely serious here and not only do they like it, but they expect you to as well.
This is not the sound of a band dying, but rather the sound of a band that has been dead for four years. They have nothing left to say and nowhere left to go, as was evidenced by
Underclass Hero, and then emphatically shoved down our throats by
Screaming Bloody Murder. There are no signs of anything remotely original, catchy, lyrically intriguing, instrumentally adept, or…worthwhile in general. If they want to resurrect themselves, they need to scrap everything (and I mean
everything) and just start from scratch. Their styles and approaches have overstayed their welcome, and it is too obvious when the “borrow” ideas from their peers. This is a band that has dug its own grave, and they’re all to blame.
