CD Review of Blood Stained Love Story by Saliva

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Buy your copy from Amazon.com Saliva:
Blood Stained Love Story
starstarno starno starno star Label: Island Records
Released: 2007
Buy from Amazon.com

You know how TV shows “jump the shark”? Well, bands do it, too, and Saliva took the plunge at about the time frontman Josey Scott decided to single-handedly shrink the group’s testes by lending his voice to the largely awful “Spider-Man” anthem, “Hero,” with Nickelback’s Chad Kroeger. 2004’s Survival of the Sickest was head-scratching bad and Blood Stained Love Story isn’t much better.

The record is a rollercoaster of mediocre to decent to flat-out awful tunes. The album kicks off with “Ladies and Gentlemen,” a big, fat arena tune that actually has a decent lead riff. This is as aggressive as Saliva gets on this offering. Sure, the lyrics are awful (“Ladies and gentlemen / Boom! / Do you want it / Boom! / Do you need it / Boom! / Let me hear it”), but at least they act like they still have interest in busting some balls. “Broken Sunday” has a nice, crunchy riff, a suitable solo, and a fun ‘80s influence.

Then, the inevitable happens. Track three is “Never Gonna Change,” the first of several boo-hoo love songs that turn the stomach. The lyrics for this song seriously read like the scrawling a rejected high school kid makes during study hall. Saliva has the gall to follow this up with “King of the Stereo,” a complete rehash of their previous hit, “Click Click Boom,” only this time overproduced to the max. Scott tries to rap his way through “One More Chance,” and the results are embarrassing. “Going Under” is quite good, with a great opening piano riff and some nicely harmonized guitar work. The remaining four songs are all forgettable, but “Black Sheep” is so bad that you just might end up remembering it. With by far the most poorly written lyrics on the album, a distortion disaster on the guitar end, and heinous vocals by Scott, one can really only stand in awe of how bad this song is:

“I was born into a curse / An outlaw straight from birth / My mama danced around a fire / And pulled me straight from the dirt”

God almighty. The final two tracks are total limpers, but nevertheless feel overlong just like every other song.

Saliva was once a band that had some potential, but they have chosen to stay in their tried-and-true formula of monotony and boredom – at least since “that Spider-Man song.” The group is probably too far in to dig themselves out with any future releases, and that’s really a shame. All hail crass commercialism. 

~Bill Clark