Is It Just Critics That Hate Super Collider?

In an interview with metrotimes.com just a day before Megadeth were to perform in Detroit on November 27th, a candid Dave Mustaine spoke about the importance of social media, playing Detroit through the years, the prospect of retirement, and the elephant in the room — the reception of Super Collider.

Mustaine did stick to the journalist’s question and addressed the critical response, but from my perspective it’s not just the critics that have panned the album, released in June 2013. Here’s what Mustaine said:

Critics have to listen to a whole bunch of records and don’t really have time to live with them like they used to when we were younger. They’ll listen to a record once. If it grabs them, they’ll say something about it. If it doesn’t, they’ll say something else about it. If somebody has said something good about it before, journalists nowadays can be impressed by a mob mentality. They’ll jump on the bandwagon instead of being an individual and having their own opinions. There’s also that psychosis where, if a guy doesn’t like a person and he listens to the record, then it can be a masterpiece and they’ll say it sucks. I know there have been a lot of misconceptions about me over the years and my autobiography cleared a lot of that up, but not everybody’s read it.

I’m a huge Megadeth fan, so I can find something to appreciate in Super Collider and pretty much anything that the band does. I’m not such a huge fan as to be unable to recognize that this isn’t Megadeth’s best album. It’s right down there with Risk. I will say that so much of what an album turns out to be is closely tied to what the band and/or songwriters are going through personally and where their headspace is at. I’m not going to sit here and pretend to know what Mustaine was going through during the writing and recording of Super Collider, but I will assume that he was somehow distracted — why else would he enlist David Draiman as a guest vocalist?

What do you think: Are critics the only people who hate Super Collider?

Rock Hard \m/