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Stereomud - Pain
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Don't be fooled - Stereomud is not your big brother's heavy band! It's not yesterday but today and tomorrow. There are no carbon copies, cookie cutters, or assembly lines here. Stereomud is fresh and organic, moving heavy music forward like a wheel in which you either keep up with the revolution or fall off and eat shit.Perfect Self, the group's seminal thirteen-song debut, exemplifies the type of inspired edge necessarily to elevate heavy rock from its stagnant doldrums. Recorded in Los Angeles, Seattle, Atlanta and New York by producers Don Gilmore (Lit, Linkin Park, Eve 6), Rick Parashar (Pearl Jam, Alice In Chains, Blind Melon), and Howie Beno (Ministry, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Sister Soleil) respectively and mixed by Jay Baumgardner (Papa Roach, Godsmack, Orgy), the slam-banging songs on Perfect Self range from powerful, pissed-off anthems to addictively melodic and commercially-viable rock tunes that blend together like a beer and Vicodin high.Album tracks like "Don't Be Afraid," "Lost Your Faith," and "Leave" seesaw between fits of rage and smooth vocals that constantly build toward huge adrenaline blasts. Likewise, songs such as "Steppin' Away" and "Pain" match the heaviness with undeniable melodic hooks that are catchy without being trite or gimmicky. All the tracks, of course, add fuel to the fire with relevant lyrics about fighting back against social oppression and opposition from the judgmental mainstream. The lyrics, co-written by vocalist Eric Rogers and bassist Corey Lowery (whose brother Clint Lowery of Sevendust collaborated on the song "Perfect Self"), speak powerfully to a listener's social anxieties in a way that poetically verbalizes inner-demons while throwing a stiff uppercut toward uptight elitists."Heaviness is not just about smacking your guitar around, yelling, and turning up the distortion," says guitarist John Fattoruso. "Sometimes heavy can all be in the mood."The fact that Stereomud can deliver the next stage of heavy rock evolution comes not as an accident or without great sacrifice. The inspiration for Stereomud came as Corey played with Stuck Mojo and Dan Richardson and Joey Z. played with Life of Agony. Both groups claimed respectable sales numbers, owned the European music mags, and enjoyed gigantic road jaunts with the likes of Ozzy, Pantera, Tool, Sevendust, and Deftones. However, both bands were stuck at plateaus given their personnel and stylistic limitations. Judgment day was rushing toward the three musicians, and the difference between immediate comfort and long-term potential hung in the balance. Lesser artists would have chosen the former.Later adding John Fattoruso on guitar, the inspired new alliance knew the key to their success would be finding nothing less than the perfect vocalist. Dan, who was signed to Relativity Records at age fifteen with the Crumbsuckers and who later co-founded Pro-Pain, recalls, "The original vision was to retain the heaviness but with an extremely talented singer who can use his vocals like an instrument. That means doing more than just yelling." The search began, and Corey soon found the perfect pipes nearly a thousand miles away in Atlanta.Erik Rogers' reputation as a vocalist was renown throughout Georgia, and he had abundant pent-up frustration as a heavy rock vocalist in a family of respected medical professionals. Erik recalls, "I was definitely the black sheep of the family." Needless to say, Erik was the perfect fit.Stereomud, who splits its time between New York City and Atlanta, spent nearly a year working on music so that when they took their first bow, the songs would be undeniable. As expected, Stereomud were immediately embraced by the heavy music populace, and the group were soon asked to perform on the live music television show farmclub.com. Record label interest was near automatic, and Stereomud soon became the first ever rock signing to the historic hip-hop label Loud Records."More than anything," says John, "we want Stereomud to make a mark on the music community. Even when the band is all said and done, I want a kid to walk into a record store ten years later, see a Stereomud album in the shelves, and know that we were here and made a difference."By the end of the '80s, hair metal -- the most popular form of hard rock on the market -- had become a profitable formula, with record companies cranking out band after band that sold albums in direct proportion to how well they epitomized the formula that hair metal's core audience had come to expect. Although the sound and philosophy of alternative metal -- whether its early or late period -- are as far removed from hair metal as you can get, the end of the '90s saw exactly the same phenomenon occurring in that genre. While the most popular alt-metal bands had slight variations in their sounds that were obvious to dedicated fans, to most outside observers (and fans of old-school metal) they all sounded pretty much the same by the end of the decade. Which brings us to Perfect Self, the debut album by Stereomud. It's a fairly standard, pretty well-executed, turn-of-the-millennium alt-metal album, drawing on the familiar Korn/Deftones influences -- although there's perhaps a bit less of a rap influence here than with some of their contemporaries. To untrained ears, it's no better or worse than their competition, because whatever flaws it has simply sound like the flaws of the alt-metal formula in general. The band relies on fury, noise, and groove -- not riffs or melodies -- to get its music across, and its shouted chants can be catchy and intense enough to hook listeners who've grown up with alt-metal (but no one who isn't sold on the style as a whole). So, Perfect Self winds up a creditable entry in the still-flourishing alt-metal sweepstakes -- even if outsiders hungry for a new trend might wonder how much longer the Prize Patrol will be coming around.Most of the members of Stereomud (vocalist Eric Rogers, bassist Corey Lowery, drummer Dan Richardson, plus guitarists John Fattoruso and Joey Z) aren't newcomers to heavy rock -- Richardson is veteran of both the Crumbsuckers and Pro-Pain, Joey Z was in Life of Agony, while Lowery used to be in Stuck Mojo. Since the members hail from either New York or Georgia, the quintet split their time between the two states, as they honed their heavy yet melodic sound by playing shows and appearing on the now-defunct TV show Farmclub. Soon after, the band was signed to Loud Records (a subsidiary of Columbia), and 2001 saw the release of their debut, Perfect Self. The debut album employed the services of three different big-name producers: Don Gilmore (Lit, Linkin Park, Eve 6), Rick Parashar (Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Blind Melon), and Howie Beno (Ministry, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Sister Soleil) and was mixed by Jay Baumgardner (Papa Roach, Godsmack, Orgy).
