A kid is frequently just a lock waiting for a key. In 2006, I found my key when I discovered Rob Zombie. I became obsessed with his music: he was the only thing I thought of for about a year.

I went deeper on him than anyone should go without a fedora and a $200-a-day-plus-expenses account, making it my business to know about every obscure B-side, every film soundtrack contribution, and every guest appearance. I knew that “Dragula” was originally titled “West of Zanzibar”. I knew about the infamous La Sexorcisto promo cassette which contains extra samples cut from the final album because of usage rights (here’s some of it). I knew which scenes in House of 1000 Corpses were filmed in Rob Zombie’s apartment after the budget ran out. I even defended Educated Horses on internet forums, which is like waving a saber and making a Banzai charge for a nation that has already surrendered. An early version of this site was named after a Rob Zombie track.^[1]I had a recurrent dream where Rob Zombie and I hang out. Picture this: he’s in the studio, just a shambling mountain of hair. I’m a kid, down on the floor, untangling XLR cables. I hear … Continue reading

At a certain point, the key no longer fit the lock.

What happened? I grew older, and listened more broadly to metal and punk. I heard the original issue: things like Killing Joke and Ministry and Siouxsie Sioux made Rob Zombie seem like a plastic knockoff with a ‘made in China’ sticker. I noticed things about his persona which suddenly struck me as lazy or shlocky or contrived. As late as 2009, I would have still cited him as my favorite musician. But I’d officially become that fan: the one who writes one word of love for every nine words of criticism.

In 2010, I had to face the facts. Rob (after a few years of making unwatchable Halloween cheapquels for Dimension) had returned to music with Hellbilly Deluxe 2. I listened to the lead single “What” and didn’t like it. Then I streamed the album, and found myself skipping around with a weird mix of disinterest and panic slamming in my chest. Things had shifted, and I hadn’t known it.

Yes, “Sick Bubblegum” and “Werewolf Women of the SS” made me smile. “Mars Needs Women” grew on me. The rest just seemed like overly complicated and fussy arrangements of nothing. Boring. Longeurs from a fading shock-rocker who once grabbed and chokeslammed your limbic system. Huh, I thought to myself, I guess I’m just not a fan of this guy anymore.

Around the same time, I’d noticing a trend of fans being unusually prone to turn into haters further down the line (and the bigger the fan, the bigger the hater). The defining example of Fan-to-Hater Syndrome is DawnOWar, an obsessive Manowar fangirl who knew the band since the 80s, ran their website for years and years…and now has no involvement with the band beyond trashing them from every social media website that will platform her. From her Facebook page:

Manowar canceled Detroit! I see this as a victory! Maybe Manowar fans are finally going to stop letting the band rip them off.

Manowar fans complain endlessly about Joey wasting time on stage with his endless stupid long-winded speeches, so hes decided to go on tour without a band and charge $50 for the privilege of seeing him do just the part everyone hates the most. I feel like now is a good time to let your tomatoes start rotting so theyll be ready for throwing when he comes to your town.

This group is not very active but disgruntled Manowar fans PM me all the time to tell me whatever stupid thing the band or the fans did today. I quit working for Manowar at the end of 1999 because they’re jerks. Thank goodness I don’t have a need to still discuss it ad nauseum. Because thats shit that happened to me 15 fucking years ago. But I set up this group to unite the people who do have a need for this discussion. Because they are assholes, you have been suckered out of your money, and they havent been good since 1987. So post that shit here. Its what its for. Don’t PM me to tell me theyre jerks. Believe me, I know. I’ve known for 15 years. Thanks.

I never ended up disliking Rob Zombie this much. But the “fan to hater” pipeline has cast-iron welds and seldom leaks.

I think fans turn on their idols for a few reasons. Hyperfixated fans tend to be extremely aware of flaws in their God. It’s the scribal priest’s lot to copy translation errors in the Torah, after all. They also are extremely aware of the unsavory parts of their idol: the stuff that gets swept under the rug. Every famous person has scandals and drama in their past (or present): the superfan’s dubious reward is to sooner or later discover where these skeletons are buried.

Also, most musicians have public personas that are partly fake: they neither represent who the artist truly is, nor survive close scrutiny even on their own terms.

A gay listener seeking “representation” can’t avoid noticing that all of David Bowie’s public relationships have been with women, that all of Katy Perry’s public relationships have been with men. Depressed introverts always turn out to be media-savvy hypemen and self-promoters behind the scenes. Quirky oddballs always turn out to be quite sane and normal. The persona is often what attracts the fan in the first place: but the more you stare, the more fake and hollow the persona becomes (and where does that leave your love?)

Obviously Rob Zombie’s “thrifted from a Halloween store on November 1” aesthetic is a shameless, gleeful celebration of fakery in all its positive forms. That’s not an issue. But other things about his life might also be untruthful. There was a fascinating Reddit comment that I sadly can’t find now (referenced here) kind of picking apart his often-told “I was with a travelling carnival as a kid and saw a man get murdered with a hammer” story, arguing (believably) that it was implausible for such an event to happen in a small community without being reported in the news, and that some other parts of Rob’s given history are also unlikely to have happened as he describes them (that they are heavily embellished, at best). I do not know the full truth of this, but no star can help but to be a real person, and usually a far more boring one than the one they pretend to be.

While I never hated Rob Zombie like DawnOWar hates the band that she once loved enough to name her internet handle after, I quickly realized I was no longer very interested in him. This was part of a growing process—one that inevitably led to me quite enjoying Rob Zombie again. Such is the path of enlightenment.

Anyway, shall we discuss the album?

It finds Rob re-convening with most of the same guys who gave us the all-filler-no-killer midsterpiece Educated Horses: drummer Tony Clufetos, producer, and (most worryingly) guitarist John 5.

I have mixed feelings about John 5. He is a guitar virtuoso but not a compelling writer of riffs or melodies, as any of his fourteen or so solo albums will demonstrate. His bluesy, elaborate, tasteful style never meshed well with Rob’s vocals. (Happily, Mike Riggs and his simple caveman style are now back in the band, and the three songs released from the upcoming The Great Satan sound absolutely fantastic.)

Rob is not really a musician. That’s an important detail to understand. He arranges and produces and makes loops and supplies the overall artistic vision, but he does not actually write music. I remember this quote from Astro Creep 2000 guitarist Jay Yuenger on Rob’s songwriting “process”.

Later, around the time we were making Astro-Creep and after, Rob started to really hate anything with any kind of melody in it – he was always saying, “Can’t you just go ‘chunka chunka’ there?”, and I’d say, “This isn’t a drum, it’s a GUITAR, it’s got NOTES” He’d want to use techno loops for everything, cut all the music out of it, and that was a situation which went from difficult to impossible.

So that’s the outer limit of Rob’s musical skills: telling guitarists to go “chunka-chunka”. He is heavily constrained by the musicians he chooses to work with. Fun guitarist equals fun record. Boring guitarist equals boring record. This album has John 5, hence it is quite boring.

The album has little of the fun electronic/industrial loops that characterize the classic White Zombie sound. It’s just straight-ahead heavy metal for the most part. It is a bit more elaborate and arranged than Educated Horses, and there’s a primal heavy whallop that’s nice to hear again after acoustic guitars or whatever.

But it’s ultimately just not fun. It’s dated and unengaging: a churn of guitar sludge, over dry drum beats that move at a sauropod’s pace. It simultaneously sounds empty and overstuffed with surface details.

Tedious Down/Black Label Society backwash like “Jesus Frankenstein” and “Virgin Witch” and “Burn” scream and vulcanize with guitar overdubs: flashy fretboard wizardry that ultimately feels like car keys being jangled in front of your face: these songs have nothing interesting going on at a structural level. The riffs are lazy bluesy affairs that sound like things any beginner guitarist could come up in their second or third month of playing. The drumming is pedestrian. The musical ideas are all obvious, borrowed, and done to death. Listening to this music feels like wandering through a dry and parched desert.

“What” is stale Misfits worship with a blaring farfisa organ and a lo-fi, bitcrushed-to-fuck vocal track (another trick Rob has used since the White Zombie days, though now it finally grows old). It seeks to conjure a live and raw monster-punk energy, but Scott Humphrey’s overbearing wall-of-sound production does not ever feel like a band playing. It’s as unconvincing as the fake crowd noises in “Jesus Frankenstein”.

“Werewolf Baby” rocks out with bland and instantly-forgettable slide guitar that kind of sums why John 5 didn’t work in this band. Yes, he supplies some “diverse” elements (Rob was fond of stating that his guitarist could play any style of music), but it’s always the most generic, lifeless version of whatever that thing is. Want bluegrass picking that’s boring? Banjo strumming that’s boring? Arpeggio runs that are boring? John 5 is your huckleberry.

“Death and Destiny Inside The Dreams Factory” is just “What” again. A grim studio confection trying to imitate a live band playing—trying so hard you can see sweat dripping from the sound engineer’s fingers. More distorted vocals. More random guitar overdubs and punch-ins to disguise a lack of ideas.

The three songs I mentioned earlier are pretty good and basically pull their weight. “Werewolf Women of the SS” is a fun “Misirlou” knockoff, though (like the rest of the album) it feels a few bpm too slow. “Mars Needs Women” and “Sick Bubblegum” slap pretty hard. I also don’t mind “The Man Who Laughs”, which is nicely arranged and strung. It avoids Rob’s longstanding distaste of guitar solos by giving Tommy Clufetos a…drum solo. Talk about out of the frying pan.

Real talk, though: there is no “Dragula” and no “Scum of the Earth” and no “Electric Head Pt.1 (The Agony)” and no “Black Sunshine”. I can’t believe I’m saying it, but it doesn’t even have a “Let It All Bleed Out” (one of Educated Horses‘ rare Ws). If you like any of the above music, keep moving, traveller. Two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert. Nothing beside remains.

Rob himself was seemingly dissatisfied with the album. In 2011, he released a new version, with some new songs. All are quite bad.

“Devil’s Hole Girls And The Big Lack of Inspiration” is a faded Xerox of “Superbeast” with some snarls and attitude but no real hooks or catchiness. There is nothing else to say about it. I hope nobody had to give up too much of their Sunday afternoon to get this one recorded and in the can.

“Everything Is Boring” is a rare piece of social commentary—musically it’s a drab miserable slog, as unwanted as black water regurgitated from your shower drain (and equally unpleasant to wade through). The socially-aware lyrics fail to land, as both the song and the album exemplify everything Rob is complaining about.

The reissue also removes the drum solo from “The Man Who Laughs” (possibly because Tommy Clufetos was out of the band). It is replaced it with several minutes of almost transcendentally uninteresting mandolin strumming (presumably from John 5) that literally sounds like those AI-generated “10 hour Appalachian folk mix to relax to” flooding Youtube.

The matter of “worst song of the album” is resoundingly locked up by “Michael”, which is basically unlistenable and a career lowlight. “Mama, why do I want to kill you?” Oh, shut up. This song is hateful. This is what cancer has regular early prostate exams to detect.

Rob has released better music both before and after this album (though far more in the “before” column, if we’re being honest). But it did introduce me to certain realizations about art and fandom, and for this, I am thankful. Intense fascination can disappear in an instant (or sour to hatred), and probably only stems from emotional problems. Go listen to your inner child: they’re probably less dull than “Cease to Exist” and “Everything is Boring.”

Helloween’s 2007 release sees them reborn for the second time in as many decades. They became the power metal Jesus, except they did it twice. Which makes it even better. (With due respect to J-Man, is it too much to ask to die two or three times, just to put the issue beyond doubt? One resurrection may just be luck.)

It’s among their most aggressive albums. Although it doesn’t have the downtuned crush of The Dark Ride or the demented aggression of Seven Sinners, it’s still a fury. Guitars are thick and rip at you like hypersonic winds. Every song seems on the verge of stripping its bolts with sheer energy. Charlie Bauerfind gives it a rough-and-ready “too much” production style that the songs really lean into.

To be clear, Gambling is not a full return to form. There are still too many cooks per square inch of kitchen, some blatantly weak tracks, and far too much fiddling with the dials (the syrupy keyboard tone Matthias Ülmer attempts on “Final Fortune” is a self-conscious modernism that doesn’t make sense with the raw Marshall tone of the guitars). And the album cover is, of course, decrepit. The pentagram on the floor doesn’t even match the one on the roulette wheel. Satan’s leaving their asses on read.

2007 was also the year I began listening to power metal. My first Helloween song was “As Long As I Fall”, this album’s lead single. And I hated it. About two years later, I gave the band (and this album) another try, and realized it was the worst song on the album. There’s some truly sublime stuff on here.

Opening song “Kill It” is so simple it makes “Mrs God” from the last album sound like progressive rock, but it thrashes hard and destroys your neck. The black metal-inspired bridge (??) is a creative idea that absolutely works, which is not something I say often about the band’s creative experiments.

The greatest track of the album—perhaps the greatest post-2000 Helloween song—is the fast and melodic “The Saints”. Someone should piss-test this song. It just isn’t normal. It just explodes out of the gates with heavy, modern riffwork, the verses contort and build, the chorus is straight out of 1989, and the duelling guitar solos showcase every trick Sascha Gerstner and Michael Weikath know as they swing axes at each others’ heads. Anything you could possibly enjoy about Helloween, past or present, is in this song. A marvel.

The lyrics seem to be referencing legal corruption, and are delivered with snarl and bite by Deris. The microphone probably had to be destroyed after he expelled so much venom onto it. He was an unusual choice to replace Michael Kiske, but tracks like “The Saints” make powerful arguments that he was the right choice.

Sascha Gerstner’s “Paint a New World” and “Dreambound” are more speed material, with the second being the better of the two. Deris’s “The Bells of the Seven Hells” is an agitated uptempo thrasher with a diabolic vocal performance. “IME” is another great Deris-penned track, full of angst and piss and rage.

A large pile of bonus songs round things out, some of them better than the actual songs on the album. “Find My Freedom” is a great faster track. “See the Night” opens with “Born into a neighborhood that ain’t exactly rich / Never knew his father and his mother was a bitch!”. Which is, uh, better than I could write in German, I suppose. “We Unite” is another fierce, barnburning anthem.

On the other (more limp-wristed) hand, “As Long As I Fall” opens with an insipid keyboard tinkle that sounds like it was recorded to test sound levels and an awful buzzkill of a chorus. “Helloween plays Christian rock” is kind of a Roko’s Basilisk for me—a concept I don’t need in my head. It’s Deris’s songwriting at its worst, just as “Kill It” sees him at his best. “Can Do It” is another “Heavy Metal Hamsters”—a songwriting well the band continually draws from, never with any success. A blandly brainless KISS-style party rock song, it’s better skipped over. Grosskopf’s “Heaven Tells No Lies” is Kim-Kardashian’s-ass-sized album filler that bounces around for seven minutes. “Fallen to Pieces” is a ballad with a fast section questionably integrated. “Final Fortune” is just a flat line of cliches. There is no way this song took any longer for Markus Grosskopf to write than it took me to listen to.

There’s about 35 minutes of good-to-great material on Gambling with the Devil. And the weak tracks mostly tend to be “filler track” rather than “Helloween playing ska or nu metal”. The house did not win. Not this time.

You’d better like 1977’s rock opus Bat Out of Hell. You were conceived to it. I am not speaking hypothetically. You were actually conceived while it was playing. I know this as a fact. I was there. I was watching.

“Are we doing an ‘I fucked your mom thing’ here?” Sadly, no. I did not participate in your conception. I was wearing my Roscoe the Rat costume at the time, and Mr Jenkins (my shift manager) would yell at me if I even unbuttoned the bum flap without notarized consent, so I was forced to remain an observer. I remember finding it odd that two people were screwing in the drive-thru of Roscoe the Rat’s Squeak-tastic Burger Barn, but was glad to finally see the miracle of life occur. Anyway.

This album had a lot working against it. An album of eight minute Wagnerian piano ballads, starring a chubby farmboy from Texas, released in the face of two adversarial headwinds—disco in the US, punk in the UK—yeah, good luck with that. To a risk-averse music industry, this album must have seemed like a scientific experiment in how to sell zero copies. It eventually sold forty-four million. Which is nearly the same as zero, when you think about it (I didn’t).

But songwriter Jim Steinman believed in being out of step with the times, believed in being unfashionable on purpose. It usually doesn’t work, but sometimes it’s the only thing that can. It’s never easy, though. Meat Loaf and Steinman had to tour the record relentlessly, finally breaking the beast in Canada (where it’s currently 2x Platinum). Canadians are right to love Meat Loaf, just as they’re right to love Fleetwood Mac (Rumors is also 2x Platinum). Let’s do Canadians a favor and stop examining their cultural tastes while they’re ahead.

But success came at a price. Meat Loaf’s brutal road schedule did not allow off-days so his voice could recover, which meant it it didn’t. Meat Loaf tore his amazing voice to shreds performing these songs live, five days a week. His next album (1981’s Dead Ringer) finds him a haggard shell of his former self. It’s a dispiriting listen. He died so that Bat Out of Hell could live. There are several Michael Lee Aday albums. But in a sense, this is the one and only record ever made by Meat Loaf. Bat Out of Hell is glorious: a work I truly love. But it’s tragic, as well as magic.

(The above is Steinman’s own account of what went wrong with Meat Loaf’s voice. A perusal of Setlist.fm suggests a far more relaxed schedule than he lets on, with countless multi-day breaks between shows. But maybe there are dates missing, so take that for what it’s worth. Which is also how you should take Meat Loaf’s own claim that his voice loss was mainly “psychosomatic”.)

And the album’s very magic. Enchantment leaps off the speakers, out of the cover, and out of nearly every other element of its conception. Few albums are so uniformly great in every aspect. It has wonderful singing, great production and engineering, and beyond superlative songwriting.

Two of the three greatest compositions Jim Steinman ever wrote in his life are on here (the third being “Faster than the Speed of Night” by Bonnie Tyler).

The first highlight is “Paradise by the Dashboard Light”, a great and hammy piece of Springsteen-style storytelling, packed with cool moments and inspired ideas. And it’s funny, too—overflowing with tonal influences from Steinman and Ellen Foley’s work with National Lampoon. My only complaint is that the “will you love me?” part goes for a long time, and finally exhausts the listener the way it exhausts the protagonist. (Apparently Steinman’s original version was twenty minutes long, and had him doing the Phil Rizzuto baseball bit himself.)

But the masterpiece—of the album, and of several of the creators’ careers—is closing opus “For Crying Out Loud”. A lesson in how to take an unsuspecting piano and pound it until the stars fall. The middle section breaks, strings crash, and then total cataclysm occurs. Atoms split, everything’s louder than everything else. It’s an astonishing album closer. An off-ramp that sends you flying into space.

Everything else here is great too. The opening track is a powerful scorching barn-burner, grasping and ambitious and realizing those ambitions. “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad” finds Steinman in standard power balladeer mode—a cloak he obviously wears quite well. Even the shorter album tracks rule all over the place. “All Revved Up And No Place To Go” is more great Springsteen-type stuff. I love the double-time groove at the end. It sounds so fiery and kickass and cool.

Most of the album is very dramatic. Perhaps excessively so, to some tastes. I guess maybe it verges slightly on the wrong side of theater-kid precious, but I don’t really mind it. And there are plenty of moments where it’s absolutely not taking itself seriously, to offset the sturm-und-drang. Todd Rundgren offers quite a lot of ironic detachment—the opening riff in “Paradise” sounds like a mega-cliche’d blues riff that you’d play when you’re taking the piss. There’s an element of persiflage to what Bat Out of Hell is doing. Of trying to make the audience smile while not totally undermining the project. It does the hardest thing: satirizes itself while also taking itself seriously. No matter what level you approach this CD on, it meets you there.

None of the other Meat Loaf albums equal this.

His big comeback, Bat out of Hell 2 does offer strangely exact parallels in a lot of ways. (And not just because it had a song that, like “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad”, your buddy from school would swear up and down was secretly about anal sex, harr harr.) Again, Meat Loaf released it in the worst of possible years—by 1993, grunge rock had just broken in the states, and R’n’B had a commercial stranglehold that I viscerally remember. And suddenly, you had this disc of massive operatic cheeseburgers that sold a million million copies. Another inspiring win for the little guy. Or the big guy, I guess.

But sometimes the parallels go awry. The singing is not as strong. And where Todd Rundgren’s production of Bat out of Hell is timeless, Bat Out of Hell 2‘s production now feels (while not bad) fairly typical of its era. It’s essentially 1993, The Album, with that “early-gen CD sound”—a bit harsh, a bit too informed by the ultra-processed sound of glam metal. There are some modernistic touches that don’t quite gel with the Broadway-meets-Peter Pan grandeur being attempted.

Bat Out of Hell 3 is not something I care to discuss at length. I mean, Wikipedia says that “[Desmond] Child [who produced] began recording sessions by playing Slipknot CDs to get the assembled musicians in the mood.” That’s a better summation of the album’s issues than I could ever write.

It contains a grab bag of mostly old (and mostly second-tier) Jim Steinman compositions (who was sadly in fading health at the time), fluffed out with whatever Songwriters’R’Us guys Meat Loaf could find (Rob Zombie’s John 5, Motley Crue’s Nikki Sixx). It’s long, exhausting, tonally confused, and unnecessary. It does not earn its name. To its credit, few albums do. The first Bat out of Hell extends out of rock entirely, and is arguably bigger than music itself.

Like all of Jim Steinman’s work, Bat Out of Hell owes no allegiance to any form of media. It’s a rock album, but even that ultimately seems almost accidental. It could have just as easily been a play (it started out that way), or a film, or a book, or a tube of wart-removal cream. The fact that Bat out of Hell is the particular thing it is seems like a twist of fate. Steinman’s patented technique of making things bigger than big and more colorful than color works on any canvas. Maybe not the wart-removal cream canvas. He’s compared to Springsteen more than enough (in this review, too), but there’s a bit of Bowie in him. Bowie was essentially a light entertainer who used rock—like a latter day French chanson singer. I like that. Use art in whatever way you can. Don’t be its slave.