Review Summary: Saliva comes back with a winding, boring, drawn-out love epic filled with slow nu-metal ballads that don't feature what made Saliva popular in the first place.
Rap rock is dead. Nu metal is dead. Well, I guess then Saliva is dead. Fusing rap/rock and nu-metal, you had Saliva. Saliva took a few years off; came back with a dead genre and sent this pitiful attempt at a record into the mainstream. I've never been a big Saliva fan; but still let me say that
Blood Stained Love Story may be one of the worst records ever recorded. They've taken a step towards the mainstream, but this album is so bad that mainstream rock radio stations didn't even pick it up. Saliva should have
stayed dead.
There's so many songs that just make your ears bleed. From the unbelievably pointless opener
Ladies and Gentlemen, to the ballad
Here With You,
Blood Stained Love Story manages to be worse than mediocre. It's terrible. They lost the hard rock edge they had before with previous albums and managed to throw countless ballad after ballad at you. The songs all sound alike. They have no identity; no feel. The title says it all; it's a Love Story with listener's blood shed all over it.
There's a few scattered rockers which have the edginess Saliva was known for; songs like
Ladies and Gentlemen,
King of the Stereo,
One More Chance, and
Black Sheep.
Ladies and Gentlemen has some interesting noises, good guitar riffs and some nice vocals, but the lyrics are completely corny and pointless. They manage to add a cheap 'BOOM!' to the front of the chorus just so it could possibly be as successful as
Click, Click, Boom! but it doesn't; it just adds to the randomness of the song. Of course there's the rap/rock wanker
King of the Stereo which feels like an old Saliva song, but with one of the worst choruses ever and the worst voice effect I've ever heard the song quickly becomes pain for the ears.
One More Chance is tolerable, featuring a rather unoriginal verse, but an old Saliva feeling chorus. But it's completely unoriginal, so I guess I could live without it.
Black Sheep rips off U2's guitar sounds and riffs and completely disappears with everything else on this disc.
Then there's the countless love ballads that are scattered all through
Blood Stained Love Story like
Broken Sunday which is a bit louder than the rest, but ridiculously elementary instrumentally; and sounds like every other song Saliva has released. Then there's
Never Gonna Change which features some boring verses and choruses; and you feel like the lead singer is just going to bust out and cry at any time.
Going Under never really picks up and just seems to wind on forever when it's not even 4 minutes long;
Twister may be the worst infusion of rock techniques ever that form one of the worst songs ever.
Starting Over is another overly-depressing whiny nu-metal ballad that sounds like every single other nu-metal ballad on the radio. Finally the song ends with
Here With You (that's right; another ballad!) which tries to be a heartfelt epic but seems as if it's a regurgiated summary of everything our ears have suffered.
Saliva's
Blood Stained Love Story has officially put Saliva among the lists of the worst bands ever. Completely dropping anything that made them unique, they put out an album that manages to be bland, unbearably boring, and unnecessarily filled with slow, nu-metal love ballads. Not to mention it sounds like anything that was on the radio 3 years ago. Saliva; your genre is dead. This album was the most drawn-out, pointless waste of time I have ever set my ears upon.
