Album Review: Screaming Bloody Murder by Sum 41

Deryck Whibley, the front man of Sum 41, is the ex-husband of Avril Lavigne so we get our second album in a month dealing with their divorce.  Whibley has been deep in the weeds on this divorce as he not only wrote every song for this album, but produced much of Lavigne's album this year, at least what I thought of as the better stuff on her album. 

As you can imagine for someone who has spent this much time hashing over his divorce this album is angry and confused.  He even does a good job of writing a few songs that sound like Avril Lavigne songs which I found interesting. 

Whibley is now 31, Lavigne is now 27.  They both splashed on the screen around ten years ago when they were considerably younger and it's interesting to see them trying to deal with this very adult problem.  I actually think Whibley succeeds better on this album than Lavigne did on hers in part because he also took over the production role on this album, while Lavigne was stuck at times with people who were more interested on crafting a fun pop single than getting to the heart of where she was trying to go lyrically and emotionally.  Here we get the full blown anger and frustration with being 31, facing divorce from someone who was your best friend, and wondering what happens next.

The album can be a bit bombastic at times, but I don't have a problem with that because of the content here.  It's not an upbeat album and I'm not sure when would be a good time to listen to this unless you yourself are struggling through a serious breakup. 

Following the Rhapsody rating method I give it 3 out of 5 stars for Pretty Good.