Review Summary: Ironic masterpiece? Or Unironic disaster?
Mixed Psychosis is a good reason why you don’t dump copious amounts of money into your newborn local rock project unless it’s really, really worth it. Even then, consult with others before you donate to the internet. If you don’t, you may end up releasing one of the worst albums ever…or something so hilariously bad, it comes back around to become a masterpiece.
I discovered Mixed Psychosis on Facebook through a suggested advertisement in 2020. I too was in a local metal band and was eager to support anything indie that floated my way with a “treat others the way you’d want to be treated” mentality. Unfortunately, one quick glimpse of their album cover art was enough to abandon my cordial mindset. The image in the advertisement showed a woman in gothic attire horribly photoshopped against, what looked to be, a royalty-free CGI brick wall. Engrained on the brick wall were the words “Mixed Pyschosis” and “Rage of Eternity”, spelled out in beautiful Comic Sans font. There was so much to pick apart here: two of the most generic local metal names back to back, the edginess, the lack of awareness with the artwork, and the fact that someone undoubtedly spent a lot of money promoting all of this through Facebook’s suggested ads. I felt awful for succumbing to uncontrollable laughter. I said “if this is the artwork, how bad could the music be?”
To be honest, that artwork was a perfect companion to their music. Their Facebook page immediately directed me to a link of their lead single, and supposed title track for their upcoming debut album, “Rage of Eternity”. I was bombarded with so much to say that I couldn’t comprehend where to begin. A glaring issue that would later foreshadow Mixed Psychosis’s ill-fated downfall is revealed in just the first two seconds of music: untimed drumming. Perhaps nobody in this band had heard of a metronome, but they managed to make every single instrument slightly out of time from each other. Then the first vocalist comes in, though “singing” is far from the right word to use here; they appear asleep, uninterested, and completely devoid of passion, akin to what it would sound like if Steve Wright formed a rock band. The one moderately high note they’re assigned with hitting is hilariously missed, shambled by a prepubescent vocal crack. Then, a second vocalist comes in, a guy who must’ve thought he needed to make up for the first vocalists’s lack of emotion with far too much emotion. In the right audio channel sits a poor-man’s singer from Cake, and in the left seeps in the worst “heeber-deeber” butt rock groaner of all time, a bloke akin to drunk Eddie Vedder making fun of James Hetfield. Out of nowhere, the song suddenly kicks into high gear with a double-bass carried thrash-inspired chorus, but the monotonous robot vocals fail to kick into the same gear. At this point, it’s hard to wonder if the song was meant to be a joke, or some attempt at drumming up publicity with a new “worst band of all time?” clickbait Youtube video. The song ends with a half-cool sludge metal breakdown, one that almost makes you motion into headbanging, or at least a few subconscious head nods, but it’s layered with incomprehensible heeber-deebers and a flute solo! And this is just one song! I mean, holy ***, where do I start? Is this awesome or abysmal? Well, maybe both.
Mixed Psychosis are (or were, more likely) a fledgling band from Houston, Texas, through the kind of band they were is hard to decipher; although the riffs seem to emulate metal, the production is so horrendous that it’s quite difficult to hypothesize if that was the true intent. They seem to barrow influence from tons of sounds, including Neo-classical, folk metal, thrash metal, alternative rock, and progressive rock, with some avant-garde elements sprinkled in for good measure. Whereas most indie local metal acts claim they “can’t be defined by genre” but then sound identical to every other Pantera or Metallica clone, even the biggest cynic couldn’t argue that Mixed Psychosis are more of the same. Of the six songs on this EP, only “Rage of Eternity” has vocals, whereas the others are instrumentals lead by…get ready…a lead flutist! Now, hey, that’s pretty cool, right? Perhaps the intention was embody the creative offspring of Jethro Tull and Faith No More, but the end result is closer to The Shaggs or King Uszniewicz.
The most intriguing part of Mixed Psychosis’s Episodes is that it has plenty of unironically catchy riffs, easily observed in “Glimpse From Another Reality”, a song that nearly sounds hypnotic and eerie with its meshing polyrhythms, and their interpretation of Bedřich Smetana’s “Die Maldau”, which actually has a cool main riff! Unfortunately, every great moment is ruined by some of the worst local band production ever conceived, an issue that shrouds the album in a blanket of hilarity. No, it’s not the “recorded with a cellphone” kind of bad production; in fact, it appears all instruments were hooked directly into the computer via a raw interface without any microphones, amplifiers, or equalizers. Pushed completely into the right speaker are the worst artificial plug-in distortion guitars you’ll ever experience, while the poorly-played bass guitar is pushed completely to the right. Depending on which headphone you’re missing, you’ll be wondering if they either took inspiration from …And Justice For All, or if the guitarist fell asleep. On top of this, the programmed drums are helmed by someone devoid of comprehending tempo or keeping time with the bass, which is already horribly out of the time with the flute, which isn’t even in the same room as the guitarist. The only way I can imagine a producer could mess up mixing and timing this poorly is if every instrument was simply in a different building on a different block from each other. I really can’t fathom how it sounds this bad, and I can’t fathom how Mixed Psychosis thought this was worth spending hundreds of dollars into promoting.
Five years later, Mixed Psychosis has been mostly scrubbed from the internet. Their Facebook page has been inactive since late 2021, most of their Youtube videos have been privatized, and it’s likely the members of the band want nobody to remember the monstrosity they accidentally released to the world. I think I relate a lot to Mixed Psychosis because, just when their project was attempting to rev up in 2020, I too was in a mediocre local band that dumped tons of rent money into advertisement and music videos. And, much like Mixed Psychosis, that band quietly dissolved less than a year later, deleted their website, and took most of their music off of streaming. Sure, my old band was pretty bad in more ways than one, but we also had plenty of good moments to warrant existence, and it’s a shame that I can’t go back and listen to work we put months upon months of energy into, even if it was plagued by awful singing and clueless production. The thing about Mixed Psychosis is that maybe they could’ve been pretty good with solid production, competent musicianship, and actual singers. Then again, one could probably make that argument for any band, right? What I mean is that Mixed Psychosis has a lot of identity, a lot of originality, and a lot of cool ideas that shine through the atrocious drumming and nuclear production. Even as I work on my current local band, a project I hope I don’t regret in five-years time, it’s subliminally easy to submit to the pitfalls of awful singing, amateurish audio engineering, and untimed percussion. If anything, Mixed Psychosis is a textbook lesson in why you don’t throw your unfinished demos onto the internet when they aren’t perfected, a lesson that could hopefully instill the concept of “would I buy this if it weren’t mine?” into the brains of future local bands before they burn any hard-earned cash on promotion or music videos.
