Million Dollar Mouth: The PanicKing Review

Million Dollar Mouth’s The panicKing is a whole lot of grunge a la Stone Temple Pilots and Alice in Chains with a hint of the garage rock post-punkiness of The Strokes. The album has its fair share of strong melodies delivered by sludgy guitars and vocal qualities that mirror Scot Weiland’s - both in tone and swagger. Million Dollar Mouth resembles the Stone Temple Pilots in a myriad of ways, many of which are positive, but for those who remember the lashing the band received by critics, it also can be quite negative.

The band puts everything up-front with the stellar opening track “Big Kiss”, a song which could no doubt be an alternative radio staple. The opening track has more of the post-punk and rawness of The Strokes than the grunge elements which are a little more predominant in the rest of the album.

One of the biggest problems in regards to The Stone Temple Pilots were their unoriginality and inability to fill an album with hit after hit. Of course, no band is expected to write an album where every song is a classic, however, when recording the kind of music STP created, things can become dull quickly. Million Dollar Mouth follows suit where the songs quickly begin to mesh together and lose their potency. After the fifth track “Don’t Disappear” things start to become a bit of a blur. This is not to say that the following songs aren’t good stand alone tracks, the issue is the songs start to become stale due to redundancy.

Million Dollar Mouth has talent, and I see them as a band with a lot of room to grow. With a little more writing outside of the box, this band could really go places. Each track on the album is quite good when standing on its own, the problem is getting through them all in one listen.

Grade: C+