Megadeth’s Dave Mustaine Says Risk Should Have Been a Solo Record, Completely Misjudges Why Everyone Hates It

I haven’t actually tried to listen to Megadeth’s Risk all the way through in roughly eighteen years, but if memory serves, the reason everyone hated it when it came out was because it sucked.

Which sounds obvious enough… but I guess isn’t so obvious to Dave Mustaine! In a new interview with uDiscover (below), Mustaine blames Risk‘s poor reception on producer Dann Huff, the executives at the band’s then-label (Capitol), Megadeth fans’ expectations, the Easter Bunny, and everyone else who isn’t him (transcription via Blabbermouth):

“This is what happens when you have a production team and somebody has control over the time and different stuff like that that goes along with creating the songs. Because the BPM [beats per minute] for that record… He had said the key to hit songs is everything being in the 120 BPM range. So it wouldn’t surprise me if you got a metronome and went and listened to ‘Youthanasia’ how many songs you would find are in that 120 BPM range. And that’s one of the reasons why, when I went back and remixed those and remastered those records, we reset some of those songs back to their original temps, which a lot of them were a little faster. ‘Cause the songs felt better, but when you slowed them down, sure, they got a certain heaviness to them, which was awesome, but there was also that speed complex that you have to add into the equation if it’s Megadeth music.

“Thus the backlash with ‘Risk,’ because people expected that speed and thrashy kind of stuff. If that record would have been called the Dave Mustaine Project, people would have loved it. But because it said Megadeth, they expected Megadeth. And that was my mistake; I should have called it a solo record. But I had the band guys on there, which would have been totally disrespectful to do that.”

Man, it must be so freeing to be Dave Mustaine! A grown man who willingly wrote and recorded an album for which he takes no responsibility. I wonder if the dude has ever had a crisis of conscience about anything.

But I digress.

Look. I really, really, really, really, really doubt people would have loved Risk if it had either been released by the Dave Mustaine Project or sped up. Is the poor man’s Nine Inch Nails section still in “Insomnia”?

Is “Prince of Darkness” still less exciting than bungie jumping less than a foot?

Will “Crush ‘Em” still make you stupider just by listening to it?

Is there still a wannabe alternative song about picking up bread featuring lyrics like “Lower than a hemline/ Dancing on the breadline”?

Yes? Well, sorry, bud, but the album is capital-F Fucked. Call a heap of shit a rose garden if it pleases you, but it’s still a heap of shit. I think Shakespeare said that.