A friend, discussing Disney’s 1949 film The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, had this to say about one Walter Elias Disney.

Disney’s historical impact is complicated. On the one hand Walt Disney was a bad man in one thousand ways (although I think as the face of media’s Evil Empire he gets strange flack for crimes he’s not guilty of. Family Guy deserves a huge chunk of blame here) who left the entertainment industry and probably the entire world a worse place than he found it. On the other hand without him we never really would’ve had cartoons in the way that we have them now. Sorry but no Looney Tunes. Anime would be something unrecognizable. No Rocky and Bullwinkle. No Simpsons. I know this seems melodramatic but his impact on animation was meteoric. Tex Avery would still have been born and would probably have made some masterpieces but he got his start with Disney and sharpened his sensibility against The Disney Tone. I think without Disney, theatrical cartoons would’ve crested with the Fleischers in the early 30s and gradually died out after the Hays Code. We’d still be making cartoons but you’re kidding yourself if you think Ub “Flip The Frog” Iwerks was sparking culture in the same way. I’m not sure which reality I’d prefer -the one with or without Walt Disney- and luckily I don’t get to choose. You don’t want a guy like me making those calls.

When pressed for details about why Disney was bad, he cited the usual stuff—busting up strikes, and naming names to the HUAC, and that sort of thing.

“Walt Disney was bad” is a valid perspective. My perspective is that Disney was not a bad man, just a flawed one with a demon on his shoulders that he probably couldn’t see. A fear of losing control of his art ran through all he did, and his paranoia manifested in ugly ways. Ways that he likely regretted in his better moments.

He seems like a fictional character, so the temptation is to let your brain lazily flood-fill an existing fictional character on top of what you don’t know. He’s Willy Wonka^[1]When I Googled “Willy Wonka”, it returned Johnny Depp ahead of Gene Wilder, and I attempted suicide because of this. I leaped out of a window. It was only a first floor window, plus I … Continue reading, Mr Burns, Michael Jackson (good), Michael Jackson (pejorative), the Pointy-Haired Boss…picketh your poison.

My (sympathetic) reading comes from Michael Barrier’s excellent biography The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney (University of California Press, 2007). It gave me a fuller picture of Disney as a man. Enough that many puzzle pieces fall into place: not just about Walt, but about the culture he created (and we now live in, for better or for worse).

His early working life was the same damned thing happening on repeat. He’d build something from scratch (a company, a partnership, a creative franchise), and then have it stolen or destroyed senselessly in seemingly a moment. Sometimes he was wrecked upon the vicissitudes of luck. Other times he was outmaneuvered by flinty businesspeople like Pat Powers and Charles Mintz. He usually had very little warning before the ground fell out from under him. After a distribution deal with Universal fell through in 1928, he realized he’d lost the rights to his studio’s benchmark character—Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. He was forced to create a new one—Mickey Mouse—on the train home from New York.

This sort of “You made this? I made this” deal was the lot in life of many 1920s and 1930s cartoonists. See, for example, Otto Messmer losing Felix the Cat—a character who he is extremely likely the creator of—to Pat Sullivan. ^[2]Pat Sullivan has a real “sorry for party rocking” Wikipedia page, by the way. Eight headings, two of which are “Rape Conviction” and “Racism”—and text sprinkled … Continue reading Then (surely now) animators treated their work with a light touch. Whatever their role in creating a famous character, it was seldom “theirs” in a legal sense, and had to be disposable. But with the success of Snow White, Disney thought he’d escaped that trap. He’d built something that would last.

In the 1940s, problems massed against the studio. The war destroyed the European market for cartoons. Costs of producing films continued to rise as techniques became more elaborate and its workforce expanded—which also meant management (and Walt) became separate from the worker bees, creating a stratified business where the various “layers” (ink and paint, storyboard, directing, management) drifted apart and had little idea of what was happening above them or under them. In this situation, a business can end up at war with itself. (Read Zvi’s “Moral Mazes”).

With the studio in millions of dollars of debt, and contemplating drastic layoffs to meet bank loans, Disney’s paranoia fell on the rank and file. He heard stories of workers unionizing (on company time), and saw it as the next verse in the same old song and dance. Dark powers were assembling to destroy him, but now the stakes weren’t “a business partner”, or “a handful of animators”, or “a character”, but “a company with 1200 employees that was making the most technically elaborate works of animation ever made”. He probably thought “Not today, Satan.” He’d finally found a hill he was ready to die on.

(And we should not be too naive about the labor movement. A lot of people involved were literal criminals and thugs, like Willie Bioff, enforcer for the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees. ^[3]Bioff has another hall of famer Wikipedia page, which ends in “Bioff walked out of his home and slid behind the wheel of his truck. A moment later, an explosion rocked the neighborhood. Parts … Continue reading )

I also learned more about Disney’s father: a cold and difficult man who demanded unquestioning obedience from his children. If Walt or his brother were tardy in obeying some instruction, they’d get “whupped” with whatever Elias Disney had to hand: a hammer, or the flat of a saw. From the age of nine, Walt was put to work on a newspaper route in Kansas City by his father (who refused to pay him). Walt’s own account of his childhood is so woeful it verges on comedy, like Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen sketch.

“We had a newspaper route . . . delivering papers in a residence area every morning and evening of the year, rain, shine, or snow. We got up at 4:30 a.m., worked until the school bell rang and did the same thing again from four o’clock in the afternoon until supper time. Often I dozed at my desk, and my report card told the story.” Forty years afterward, he still dreamed that he had missed customers on his route. “I remember those icy cold days of crawling up these icy steps” to put the newspaper inside a storm door, he said in 1956. Elias insisted that the papers not be thrown on porches or in yards, but carried to the front door. “I was so darn cold I’d slip, and I could cry, so I cried.”

Ya tell that to kids now and they won’t believe you.

It stood out to me that Elias (like many farmers) was a union man—a member of the American Society of Equity, and firmly under the sway of Eugene V. Debs. Walt learned to draw by copying comics from Appeal to Reason, a socialist magazine that his father subscribed to. Maybe Walt had lingering bad associations about the kind of man who joins a union because of the kind of man his dad was. It’s possible. So are many other things.

So that’s the positive gloss on Disney’s activities: a justly-paranoid man trying to protect his art. I am not saying this was the truth, or that he reacted correctly.

But what was Disney’s “art”? And how much of it was “his”?

Walt’s position in media is complicated. So is his position in my head. He is a fundamentally a confusing individual, and Michael Barrier’s biography doesn’t shed much light on it. I kept thinking of nostalgebraeist’s the void—a character that just doesn’t make sense or have internal coherency yet still claims that it exists. Disney feels like that too.

Was he charming and avuncular, or a quiet introvert? Was he a Pollyannaish idealist, or a flinty realist? Did his workers love him, or did they not? It seems you can make any interpretation of Disney work by selecting some facts and ignoring others. And to be sure, an entire life offers ample opportunities for apparent contradictions to emerge.

One striking irony is that Disney was a perfectionist who himself was not capable of perfection. Films like Bambi have some of the best technical animaton ever attempted, and they were done without computers or digital ink and paint or anything like that.

But Disney himself was an animator of utmost mediocrity. His own work can be seen in Alice’s Day at Sea. It’s creative in its blending of live action, stop motion, and 2D animation, but the animation is shoddy even for 1924. (To be fair to Walt, these were cranked out at Stakhanovite pace for pitiful sums of money, and I’m sure he didn’t regard this as fine work.^[4]Apparently the live action footage of public places was shot illegally—Laugh-O-Gram couldn’t afford permits—and they’d run if they saw a policeman watching! That said, where is his fine work?)

By the 1930s, Disney realized that he was better stepping away from the coalface of the animation industry. His skills had long been eclipsed by others. He became a marshaller of the creative talents of others. (He said of himself: “I’m the little honeybee who goes flying around sprinkling pollen here and there to keep everything going.”)

Was he a good overseer of others’ work? I think so. To an extent. Certainly, most of the Disney artists (even the great ones) who left the company accomplished little of note without him. They had their weaknesses and limitations, too. Overall, Disney had excellent taste for where the industry was going, and where it could conceivably go. He saw possibilities. He felt that animation had to grow larger and larger, expanding its vocabulary, assimilating other forms of media. I think Fantasia, for example, is wonderful.

But at the same time, his instincts clearly failed him many times. Isn’t there obviously a fair amount of bad stuff in classic Disney films? Even the ones that are rightly regarded as classics?

They’re very kitsch. John Kricfalusi had a cruel but funny dig about the average Disney screenplay: it contains 10 minutes of plot and 60 minutes of flowers singing and birds wiping dishes with their butts. Anyone who, like Ralph Bakshi, thinks animation has to mean something ([the idea of] “grown men sitting in cubicles drawing butterflies floating over a field of flowers, while American planes are dropping bombs in Vietnam and kids are marching in the streets, is ludicrous”) will have capital P Problems and a capital D Drama with Disney. Modern aesthetes demand art that comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable. Disney’s films seem to comfort the comfortable and disturb the disturbed.

Or perhaps you agree with CS Lewis, who felt that the mark of true maturity is that one is old enough to read fairytales again.

I’ll admit there’s a streak of broad sentimental schmaltz in Disney that I have to put myself in a weird or altered mood to sit through. I don’t even hate it. I just don’t understand it. It makes no sense to me. Whatever effect Walt is trying to achieve in the singing birds of Snow White (say) doesn’t really translate to me. I’d go further, and say that certain scenes—like the idealized lissome youths presented in Fantasia’s “The Pastoral Symphony”—are outright uncomfortable to watch and unpleasant in their connotations.

The strong parts of Disney films are always the dramatic, nasty stuff. Which says something about me, I’m sure. Probably that I’m smart and sophisticated, unlike you rubes. Consider Chernobog’s hands. Those awful, flame-wreathed, nigrified hands of soot. Have you ever seen such hands? Do his hands wait for you in your dreams? They do mine. Those hands.

So I don’t understand Disney. Not in the sense that Barrier failed in his duty to accurately portray a man—I think my confusion is the portrait. Disney was a man of mirrors. Gaze too hard and you tumble into a labyrinth of references and cliches and finally you stare back at yourself.

That intensity, never visible to viewers of Disney’s television show, showed itself in his behavior when he was in the park. “He would never walk past a piece of litter,” said Michael Broggie, a ride operator in the early 1960s. “He would reach down and grab it, and everyone was expected to do that.”

I do that too! When I see garbage, I pick it up. Assuming it’s not disgusting and putrid.

There’s also some evidence in Barrier’s book that Disney presented a facade to the world. He made himself look stupid. That’s sinister to me. Men who try to look smarter than they really are a dime a dozen and harmless. Men who try to look stupider than they really are can be quite dangerous. It’s better for a mountain to become a molehill than a molehill a mountain.

While the public thinks of Disney as playing with trains and exchanging pleasantries with juvenile alumni of the now-defunct Mickey Mouse Club, he actually is one of the most widely read, most widely traveled, most articulate men in Hollywood. I became acutely aware of this when I spoke with him recently at lunch in the private dining room of his… studio. While he devoured a dietetic meal of lean hamburger and sliced tomatoes he spouted rustic witticisms with the aplomb of a modern-day Bob Burns. But every once in a while his eyes would narrow, the rural twang would disappear from his voice and he’d discuss financial projections for 1962, the modern art of Picasso and Diego Rivera, and Freudian psychiatry. In a few moments, however, he’d catch himself ” and revert to homespun stories.

While we’re contemplating morbidity (we weren’t, but just pretend)…what does it mean for Disney to die?

A common Disney trope is the death of a parent used as a symbol for maturity. Bambi’s mother is the ur-case. But the parent, of course, is not truly dead. Something of them remains in the child who must continue on without them, before dying in turn. Our bodies are pathways for ancient seething forces too great—and terrible—for bodies to contain.

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The final album by Michael “Meat Loaf” Aday and Jim “Jim Steinman” Steinman arrives bedecked in heraldry. It knows it has to matter. It pulls out all the stops. It brings back Ellen Foley and Karla DeVito. There’s “All Songs by Jim Steinman” glaring off the cover with point-making intensity, with “Desmond Child was taken out back and shot” in small print (wait, it’s not on yours? It’s on mine. Mostly because I added it in Sharpie.). Every work of art might turn out to be your last. Both men clearly sensed—maybe knew—that this was the end.

Even if you agree with producer Todd Rundgren’s view of Bat Out of Hell (Interview Q: “Do you ever put on the record and listen to it?” Todd: “Not much.”), it’s impossible to see the Julie Bell cover art—two figures vs the apocalypse; a giant with his slumped shoulders Atlas-huge and Atlas-weary, and a scrawny brave lion with his hair blowing behind him—without feeling a sting of sadness. What an incredible forty-year partnership these men shared.

And so it is with regret that I pronounce the Braver Than We Are a bin fire. If you love it, you’ll have to love it for both of us.

I knew he was sick. I still wasn’t prepared for how bad Meat Loaf sounds on this record. On Dead Ringer his voice was only worn-out and haggard, here he sounds like Mr Burns. Hearing him mutter and cough and bark through songs is demoralizing experience, turning his glorious last stand into a glorious last sit (amusing witticisms like that are the reason I am known as a “card” at parties), and sucking the panache from lyrics because you can hardly understand what he’s saying.

I am not exaggerating. This is awful. There’s a moment in “Souvenirs” (after “…cold cold night”) that’s just “Guhh-buhhh-gahhh” lip-flap that I couldn’t in a million years decipher without a lyrics sheet, plus a conspicuous cut in the audio where two salvage-job vocal tracks were spliced together. “Only When I Feel” has some of the most horrendous singing I have ever heard on a record (“End-less…payyyyyeen!”). I am just in awe of the fact that *this* was the best recording they could get out of Meat Loaf. *This.*

It doesn’t help that Foley and DeVito still sound fantastic and whenever there’s a duet they just flash-burn him to a skeleton like the Terminator 2 kid clutching the chainlink fence. On “Paradise By the Dashboard Light” Foley was a stronger presence than Meat, but that was a deliberate choice and made sense in a battle-of-the-sexes story where she had the upper hand. On “Going All The Way Is Just The Start” she steals the show from Meat in a way that isn’t planned. She’s singing against a decrepit singer whose vocal range is so limited it’s more like a vocal melee. Of course, it’s not hard to do that when you’re mixed twice as loud. It’s not every day you hear a record where the the backing vocalists are louder than the singer.

Jim Steinman described Meat Loaf’s vocals as “heroic”, which is a courteous way of saying “he’s trying as hard as he can”. ^[1]Steinman’s blog is written the same way his music is. Long and emphatic and with lots of capitalization. But that brings me to a question that I assume I won’t like the answer to: what did Steinman do here, exactly?

Braver *doesn’t sound like a Steinman record*. The bombastic Phil Spector 2.0 loudness and opulence (the wall of sound gilded and plated in titanium) is absent, backup vocals aren’t layered the way Steinman would do it, and so on. Then you see the credits, where Steinman is credited as a “Creative consultant” and think “oh, right”.

Quoting a Jim Steinman message board post from “steven_stuart” (who seems to know what’s up).

It’s basically a Paul Crook production. These days it’s difficult for Jim to actually produce in a studio but he can still produce when he sends Rink [sound engineer Steven Rinkoff – ed] to the studio as his representative. But a while ago Jim said that Rink hasn’t been invited to get involved. It’s Paul Crooks show but Meat will keep mentioning Jim because it’s good for publicity. I am sure that Jim is commenting through emails though. I think Meat said that. But I think this album is going to be more of a Dead Ringer than another BOOH. Although I like Meat a lot, so I hope it works. Especially since it could be his very last album. Meat is one of the great icons of rock. He deserves respect.

The thing Steinman certainly did not do is write tons of new music. Every song on Braver is at least several years old, and much of it is far older. The earliest tracks date back nearly half a century, and were the first he ever wrote.

Song by song:^[2]I attempted to research this with Claude Opus 4.6, a large language model. It delivered spellbinding reams of novel information, such as the fact that “Going All the Way (A Song in 6/8 … Continue reading

– “Who Needs The Young” was written in 1968, when Jim was a student at Amherst College. It was composed for *The Dream Engine* (1969) and became “In der Gruft” (“In The Crypt”) for 1997’s *Tanz Der Vampire*.

– “Going All The Way Is Just The Start” is a medley of “Draußen ist Freiheit” (“Outside Is Freedom”) / “Stärker als wir sind” (“Stronger Than We Are”) / “Das Gebet” (“Say A Prayer”) from various versions of *Dance of the Vampires/*Tanz Der Vampire*. Basically, the lead chorus melody (which originally comes from “Sail On Haym” in Steinman’s 1970s play *Little Friend from Front Street*) is “Draußen ist Freiheit”, the “*sometimes it’s the flesh…*” bit is “Stärker als wir sind”, and *”say a prayer…”* is “Das Gebet”. I am a bit uncertain about which segments date from which run of the play.

– “Speaking in Tongues” was (supposedly) written for the 2007 musical adaptation of the 1990 John Waters film Cry-Baby. Information about this is scarce. Jim Steinman claims the bridge was rewritten for this release.

– “Loving You’s a Dirty Job (but Somebody’s Gotta Do It)” is from 1985, and is found on Bonnie Tyler’s 1986 album *Secret Dreams and Forbidden Fire.*

– “Souvenirs” is from the 1973-1974 anti-war play *Souvenirs* (later retitled to *More Than You Deserve*.)

– “Only When I Feel” is apparently part of a larger composition that also spawned “If It Ain’t Broke, Break It”. I believe it was written in 2003, along with Jim Steinman’s other contributions to Suri Krishnamma’s film *Wuthering Heights*.

– “More” is (as all TRUE goths know) from My Chemical Romance’s 2006 album *The Black Parade*

– “Godz” is “The Song of Defencelessness” from Steinman’s 1972 student production of Brecht’s The Good Woman of Szechuan. It was later used in an unfinished conceptual rework of *The Dream Engine* called *Neverland*. “Godz” shares a title with a composition from the 1972 musical *Rhinegold*. This is a musically unrelated piece. It was also performed as “Great Boleros of Fire” (amazing title, also) on the *Bat Out of Hell* tour.

– “Skull Of Your Country” is “Come in the Night” from *The Dream Engine*, where it exists in the libretto as “Invocation and Formation of the Tribe” (and it was also famously reused in Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart”).

– “Train of Love” is another The Dream Engine piece, apparently from an attempted 1970 production of the play.

So, that’s a lot of very old songs.

“What else is new?” you might ask. Steinman was always rock’s biggest recycler: his “use every part of the ox” approach extended to melodies, leitmotifs, themes, lyrics, and entire songs, which would appear over and over, in different formats and mediums, decade after decade. Steinman fans enjoy this little easter egg hunt, tracking the evolution of bits of music down through the years. It’s no different to how a painter would work—returning to the same themes over and over, emphasing and de-emphasing certain features, always seeking perfection, never quite getting there.

But the truth is, Steinman worked this way out of practical necessity. He wrote at the speed of molasses dripping down a tree trunk. There’s an extensive list of one-time clients—from Def Leppard to Bonnie Tyler—who ditched him just because they got sick of waiting for the Steinman lightning to strike. Even *Bat Out of Hell II* only has about four new songs.

And yes, it’s fun to notice the changing context of Steinman’s music. (A vivid example is “Who Needs the Young”, which was written by a young man and repurposed by an old one). Few rock composers allow you to see their work flux and mutate in front of the public eye like this. His music could feel almost like a continuous thing: ideas and motifs rippling and resurfacing like flotsam decades later. Anger at the smallmindedness of the Vietnam war turning into anger at smallmindedness in general, and a desire to create the biggest and loudest art possible. A desire to top Phil Spector and Richard Wagner at their own game. A desire to peel off the face of even the blandest, most milquetoast acts (Air Supply, Westlife) and find something braver than they were underneath. An admirable interest in performance as a unifying thread over human history, transcending stylistic trends. Few producers had his ambition, or his hit rate. Steinman was probably the best songwriter to have ever lived at writing in the style he did. When he came up with music, he typically hit it out of the park. But he simply was not productive enough for a mainstream music industry that demands 40-60 minutes of new material every few years, and had to bulk up his catalogue with old music. That’s reality.

It’s also reality that you will not find anything as excellent as “Bad For Good” and “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” and “Total Eclipse of the Heart” and “Ravishing” and “Faster Than the Speed of Night” and so on. Instead, you will find covers sung by a man with a very bad voice, plus various very old works from his college-era theater productions that don’t work on an alleged rock album. “Who Needs the Young” is not even a song, it’s a bizarre bit of tin-pan alley slapstick. Was it necessary for the world to hear this? On a Meat Loaf record? This doesn’t feel like Steinman recontextualizing his work for a new audience, new medium, or new interpreter. It feels like “Steinman raking through his trunk for old sheet music to mail to Paul Crook.”

I don’t believe Steinman changed anything much in these songs: most of the alterations would have been Paul Crook’s work. And they were clearly only “changed” to 1) be easier for Meat Loaf to sing and 2) smooth over stylistic deficiencies. For example, “Godz” now has its piano line replaced by a snarling guitar lead over a stroppy martial beat. That’s fun. I don’t hate it. But it’s clearly a producer trying to toughen up a ballad-heavy album with some token Jack Black “meh-tuhhlll” heaviness.

Even if we accept all this, I just don’t find these songs compelling examples of Jim’s craft.  “Going All The Way Is Just The Start” is a good song that needed to be great. It occupies the slot that “I’d Do Anything for Love” did, and although energy does build at times, that goddamn crowdkiller of a chorus just hits the song like a shovel to the face, stopping its momentum dead. And I have never particularly loved “Loving You’s A Dirty Job”. In the late 80s Steinman started to lean into AOR blandness that didn’t suit him and overall hasn’t aged that well (“It’s All Coming Back to Me” is another egregious case). “More” has chugging guitar riffs thrown in. Great. It also loses the sparseness that made the original Sisters of Mercy song compelling.

Meat Loaf was always a parody (Todd Rundgren produced Bat out of Hell was because he was sick of hearing Bruce Springsteen on the radio and thought Jim Steinman was making fun of him) that became serious and heartfelt. Here, sadly, it collapses back to parody. Very, very sad to listen to.

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This album is exactly how you want it to be. If you (like me) find the John 5-era Rob Zombie albums a frustrating experience, with Rob’s signature creative vision mired among bland riffs and awkwardly-integrated “experiments”…well, terrible news on that front: John 5 is gone. He left the band to pursue his childhood dream of sitting on a tour bus with three middle-aged millionaires who hate each other, and we wish him the best. But this forced Rob to make a horrible decision…rehire his original guitarist, who co-wrote what many fans would regard as his best material and best solo albums. Oh no, anything but that!

Straight away, Mike Riggs (and returning bassist Blasko) just fix everything that was wrong with the last four or five Rob Zombie records. It’s brutal and direct and immediate and has more energy than a tokamak reactor. The Great Satan has three thoughts in its deranged caveman prefrontal cortex. 1) Keep it short 2) Keep it simple 3) Refer to steps 1 and/or 2 as appropriate. The album ends with its idea of a slow and meditative epic dirge. One that’s three minutes and thirty seconds in length.

This is not a return to the Hellbilly Deluxe sound. If you want tons of samples and loops and electronic textures, that’s not what he’s doing here. But if you want heaviness of the (shall we say) “metal” variety, you are feasting. The opening salvo of “FTW ’84” and “Tarantula” is almost overwhelming in its destructive firepower: staccato riffs are palm-muted out at machine-gun speed and backed with Ginger Fish’s double-bass drumming, something I’ve not heard on a Rob Zombie song in thirty years. ^[1]Not since White Zombie’s “Electric Head Pt.2 (The Ecstasy)” and “Feed The Gods”, to be precise.. Dare I say it, “Tarantula” even has some slight melodeath influences—those harmonized pitch-bends Riggs plays after the first chorus could be on an At the Gates record. The album’s stripped-down and raw, but bristling with surprising influences. It takes cues from genres and styles that I never thought Rob would go near.

Oh, and there’s punk, too. The Misfits have always been more of an inspiration than a direct influence for RZ, but near the end of the album we get “The Black Scorpion”, an all-out tribute to “Green Hell” and “Skulls” and so on—fast, neck-wrecking moshing under a blaring farfisa organ. It’s really good! As is “Punks and Demons”, a nasty, lo-fi Venom-sounding track with an 80s Slayer riff over the chorus.

“(I’m a) Rock ‘N’ Roller” is a soul-deadened tribute to literally-deadened Bowie’s “Moonage Daydream”. (T-Rex, too. I’ve always suspected that Rob might be a secret Marc Bolan fan: he has the same psychedelic lyrical approach.) It has tense, thundercloud verses. What do ten thousand people sound like to ears ringing with tinnitus? Like nothing. The rockstar is in the masses, but not of the masses. Then the chorus arrives. Or falls on your neck like a guillotine. “That doesn’t sound like fun! Also, probably fatal!” Buddy, you’re in the Spookshow International. Having your head severed by a stainless steel blade is an inconvenience, yes, but not necessarily a fatal one. It’s pretty much the price of admission.

Then there’s the fourth track and possible album standout “Heathen Days”. Propulsive and addictive and fastfastfast, the track just attacks the listener like a demented skeleton and holds up with the best stuff Rob Zombie has ever put on a record. I like the under-the-verse riff, where Riggs picks natural harmonics on the 10th and 12th fret (or something like that). Like, that’s all the sonic diversity I want, you know? I don’t really need bluegrass and chicken-picking and lap-steel slide guitar on a Rob Zombie record. I’m a simple man: just give me a natural harmonic now and then.

The album does lose some energy in its middle stretch: “Sir Lord Acid Wolfman” and “The Devilman” feel like they could be John 5 studio leftovers. They are a bit slow and baggy for my tastes. The former is apparently a pirate character Rob came up with (the patriarch of a Manson family on the high seas). But the closing track “Unclean Animals” is wonderfully eerie. A psychedelic Iron Butterfly freakout that feels like being dead. You’re wandering down a long hallway, maybe some dark woods. You can’t tell whether you’re going to the good place or the bad one, but from the smell of sulfur hanging in the air, it ain’t looking great.

So do we have a bona-fide comeback on our hands? I guess. Rob Zombie has returned. The Great Satan slaps, and I am beyond happy with 80-90% of it. “Who Am I”, asks track 5. For Rob, the answer is self-referential: *this.*  I struggle to imagine a Rob Zombie fan who dislikes this. If you are that person, I choose my next words with love and pity: I do not understand you. It might be time for the state to step in and make you comfortable. Music cannot bring you happiness. Perhaps medication will.

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