Review Summary: For a ‘return to form’, this sauce sure is missing a few ingredients
Return to the Sauce is a ‘return to form’ for Infected Mushroom in the most liberal use of the word possible. True, this record is a full dissent from the psytrance legends’ foray into the realm of mainstream dance music via their Friends On Mushrooms trilogy, though to attribute this album as a ‘return to form’ (or sauce, as Infected Mushroom insist) is a very misleading claim. Unlike all previous outings dating back to their debut,
Return to the Sauce is a different spin on the psytrance formula. Emphasizing a more straightforward writing structure that hits heavy with as many thick, bass-loaded synth leads as possible. Think, if they were to take the climaxes of the tracks “Becoming Insane” from
Vicious Delicious and “Sa’eed” from
Legend of the Black Shawarma in all their grandiose, heavy-loaded glory, and then applied it to every moment of each individual track.
It’s another unexplored avenue for the duo who has done everything from trance, to big room, to hip hop. Yet, it’s a direction that doesn’t do any favors for trying to sell an hour long record. The songwriting behind
Return to the Sauce is the most bare bones and basic of any Infected Mushroom project to date; dressed up cleverly so in a variety of neat tricks and slick bells and whistles that do a well enough job covering up the simplicity of the record’s meat. That is until they become exhausted and overdone half-way through the record when you begin to notice how often, and desperately even, they’re used on a track-by-track basis. You can only shove in so many audio-channel hops, sedated metallic audio, low-register ‘growls’, and slow to super quick-paced drum lines before someone wants something new. And unfortunately there seems to be barely anything for Infected Mushroom to work with on this record.
The best qualities of the album pertain almost exclusively to the technical aspects of the record. The mixing and sound design is exceptionally done, every beat pounds with a demanding “get up and dance” energy that is bound to get a head bobbing along to each gradual build-up; and the texturing of each element in the production gives it that familiar, yet oh-so-satisfying grit that has made every Infected Mushroom record stand out atmospherically. There are also points were Infected Mushroom piece together a hit. “Milosh”, far and beyond the best of the record, spends its ten minute stretch with an outstanding display of many of the songwriting quips that have established Infected Mushroom’s sound over the years. Serving as a well thought reminder of Infected Mushroom’s capabilities as a duo while spicing it up with the new, direct songwriting approach.
As said before, however,
Return to the Sauce offers nothing more beyond that point than to be an exhaustive effort in spicing up a sound that didn’t need such a drastic change to begin with. Say what you will about
Friends on Mushrooms or
Army of Mushroom before it, despite their drift towards commercialized trend-hopping (as critics against them describe) they proved that even with “selling out” in mind they had the capacity to craft unique, energetic, and purely fun tracks with a level of depth not familiar with many of their contemporaries. Yet on here, the only thing that Infected Mushroom manage to achieve is raising concern that after all these years they actually might be running out of ideas. So if
Return to the Sauce is indeed their ideal ‘return to form’ and an indication of where they will be going next, then perhaps it’s time to lay off the mushroom for a while.
