We can argue all day whether Slipknot or Mushroomhead donned the masks first, but what we could never debate is who’s the better act. Eight albums in and the Cleveland nine- piece have pretty much been reduced to a side-note in metal’s history, and A Wonderful Life is evidence why. Over its ludicrously long, 17-track, 71-minute running time, the band do a fairly passable job of impersonating a not-as-good version of Faith No More, stripped of all the idiosyncratic originality and genre-bending creativity that make that band so special. Instead Mushroomhead plod along on tracks like The Heresy, sounding unremarkably ‘wacky’ at best, and dated and downright clumsy at worst.
Mushroomhead’s A Wonderful Life is out now
