Club Ninja - Blue Oyster Cult

Provenance: I'm one of the biggest Blue Oyster Cult fans under pensionable age in the UK. I've got all the albums, hit up their shows, and I even used to pester them via email.

NB - this is my second BOC review and I feel I've hardly touched my music collection. However, if I did a different band every week, by the end I'll just be down to a rotation of Blue Oyster Cult / Steely Dan / Tom Waits (no bad thing, right?). For the sake of variety, I'll be sprinkling in the 'big boys' from now on, so you might get two or three BOC reviews before you encounter Atomic Rooster or Electric Wizard. Lucky you.

Review: In this guy's opinion the classic era of Blue Oyster Cult stretches from their self-titled debut (1972) through to Spectres (1977). One could therefore surmise, on that basis alone, that the 1985 album Club Ninja is not a classic - and one would be correct in doing so. However, just because a band is no longer in their pomp doesn't necessarily mean they aren't capable of pulling out the stops - witness Ratt in 2010 with Infestation, Cheap Trick's clutch of post-2005 releases or even Bob Dylan's sublime Love and Theft and Modern Times releases. Hell, I'd settle is this was Blue Oyster Cult's Get A Grip.

Well, Get A Grip it ain't. As was the case with last week's Hot In The Shade, Club Ninja features awful cover art, compounded by an absolutely dire name. [Adopting Jerry Seinfeld voice] And what's the deal with ninjas anyway? There was, of course, the execrable Michael Dudikoff vehicle American Ninja, a Cannon Films release from the same year as Club Ninja. You've got the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, who made their first comic book appearance in 1984. The geekiest explanation involves the track 'Shadow Warrior', which doesn't mention ninjas explicitly but was co-written by thriller / fantasy novelist Eric Van Lustbader, who did write a 1980 novel called The Ninja. Your guess is as good as mine.

Another common factor with Hot In The Shade is songwriter Bob Halligan Jr. He wrote some cool stuff for Judas Priest like 'Take These Chains' and 'Some Heads Are Gonna Roll'. On his one outing with Kiss he penned 'Rise To It' (the song where Paul Stanley brags about maintaining an erection) and the crapfest 'Read My Body'. Here he's responsible for similarly cerebral cuts such as 'Make Rock Not War' and 'Beat 'Em Up'. Halligan now plays in a band who advertise themselves as a fusion of rock, Celtic and contemporary Christian music.

By this point in time BOC had sloughed off original members Albert Bouchard (drums / vocals) and Allen Lanier (keyboard / guitars), and had also long abandoned their creepy psychedelic proto-metal in favour of a more 'commercial' synth rock sound. Given all that Club Ninja is, in places - frustratingly - quite good. However, those two or three inspired tracks can't make up for the remainder on offer here, because when Club Ninja is bad, it's horrible. Brutally, irredeemably horrible.

The album starts promisingly enough, with Eric Bloom delivering a delightfully hammy vocal performance on the propulsive 'White Flags'. Buck Dharma (both an underrated guitarist and singer) is up next on 'Dancin' In The Ruins', which if anything is even better. I should point out that anything that works on Club Ninja does so either because of the music or the conviction of the vocal performances, because the lyrics are uniformly bobbins. The only track that gets close to resembling the golden years of Blue Oyster Cult is the sumptuous, shimmering 'Perfect Water', once again sung by Dharma, who also brings some questing guitar work to the table. These songs are really, really decent and could quite easily feature on 'best of' compilations without appearing out of place.

The rest, alas, is drivel. The aforementioned 'Make Rock Not War' and 'Beat 'Em Up' are as boneheaded and uninspired as the titles suggest. 'Spy In the House of the Night' has a stadium-sized chorus and a kicky riff to commend it, but that's about it. The final three tracks - 'When the War Comes', 'Shadow Warrior' and 'Madness To the Method' - all exist within a lacuna of their own; competently played, slickly produced but otherwise devoid of anything interesting. One exception - Dharma's guitar solo on 'When the War Comes' is much better than the track deserves. It's a song that floats by without leaving a mark, despite a voice-over from shock-jock Howard Stern (who was, I believe, married to Eric Bloom's cousin at the time) and, unaccountably, lifting the 'ooga-chu-ka' chant from Blue Swede's version of 'Hooked On A Feeling'. That sounds like something you'd want to be hepped to, right? Be my guest.

There's also not enough Joe Bouchard on this album. One of the defining elements that made Blue Oyster Cult brilliant was the interplay between the Bouchard brothers, Joe's freewheeling bass weaving around Albert's skittering jazz-influenced drumming. Jimmy Wilcox, the drummer on this album, played it straight, giving Joe little room for manoeuvre. And he's given, what, half a song to sing? Screw that. Joe Bouchard is a good dude, not least because he gave me an interview for my school magazine back in 2002 and answered all my dumbass questions with grace and patience. Did I really imply he might've been a Nazi sympathiser? Jeez Louise.

To sum up - Club Ninja was not the disaster it's sometimes made out to be. Indeed, Blue Oyster Cult followed a trend of 70s bands trying to update their sound to stay relevant. The gold standard for this approach will always be ZZ Top's Eliminator, which worked only due to the rarest of alchemy. Instead, this represented the terminus point of BOC's slide towards anonymity - where once they were the 'red and the black', now they were the dull and the bland. At least this didn't represent the end of their story...

Spectres - Blue Oyster Cult

Provenance: I'd heard '(Don't Fear) The Reaper' on a rock compilation my dad bought and instantly declared it to be the best song ever written. So when I came across this in a secondhand shop for a fiver I had to buy it.

Review: Between the ages of about 15 to somewhere in my mid-twenties, Blue Oyster Cult were my life. I've seen them more than any other act. I have all their albums. I even interviewed bassist Joe Bouchard for my school newspaper. Between BOC, Championship Manager and active membership of an eFed, that I even so much as kissed a member of the opposite sex during this period is incredible.

The catalyst of '...Reaper' aside, this is where it all began for me. I am a callow youth with ten whole pounds to spend when I spy this in the racks. By this point it is already established that these hombres are responsible for the greatest song of all time. The album cover confirms my initial suspicion that BOC are the baddest band on the planet. There they are, hanging out in some weird badly-lit occult library, dressed to the nines and looking nonchalant because they're always holding cool seances and pissing off the cat with manifestations of ectoplasm and the like. The sleeve artwork alone should've guaranteed platinum status.

Now, some critics think Spectres is where BOC started the nosedive into generic pop-rock pabulum, one that would only be arrested momentarily by Fire of Unknown Origin. Some locate the tipping point as side two of Agents of Fortune. As a fan I completely understand, and objectively I might consider the first four studio discs to be the band's best output. But Spectres was special - like a first beer, or the first time you win promotion to Division One with AFC Bournemouth on Championship Manager 2. How do you go about explaining that magic?

Fortunately, the album kicks off with a true Cult classic - 'Godzilla', a song so potent that I was once assaulted on stage for playing the solo like a complete badass. If you're looking for the skittery, twisted mysticism of earlier BOC then look elsewhere - this had a big, dumb riff, lyrics about the scaly rogue terrorising downtown Tokyo and a Japanese spoken word section that I always had to do because nobody else in my band could remember how it went. Racer X do a splendid cover. It's difficult to resist a chorus hook that goes 'Oh no! There goes Tokyo!'

Other highlights, in order(ish): BOC were never much of a 'ballad' kind of band (and often not great when they gave them a shot) but 'Death Valley Nights' is up there as one of my favourite tracks they ever did. 'Golden Age of Leather' features buzzsaw guitars and a male voice choir to kick off proceedings. Meanwhile, the lilting arpeggios of 'Fireworks' propel the song towards one of Buck Dharma's best solos; I believe Jason Newsted said Dharma's playing was "like hot needles in your ears", which is brilliant but doesn't quite capture the agility and fluency that made his playing so distinctive.

Side two contains 'Celestial The Queen', which sounds like a Blue Oyster Cult / Electric Light Orchestra mash-up, and yet another decent ballad(!!) in 'I Love The Night', a stately attempt at ethereality which mostly comes off. My favourite moment comes in the form of the schlocky vampire yarn 'Nosferatu'; I find it hard to dislike any song that begins with the line 'Deep in the heart of Germany, Lucy clutched her breast in fear'. Canny stuff.

If I allow myself some critical distance, this is the album where the filler creeps in. The cod funk of 'Searchin' For Celine' never gripped me despite its clever lyrical allusions whilst 'Goin' Through The Motions' is a good example of nominative determinism. I've heard other fans slating the Capek-inspired 'R U Ready 2 Rock' as a bit one-note and generic but it's really grown on me over the years. Plus the title is indisputable proof that Prince, like all good people, was a huge fan of 'the Cult'.

Compared to other analyses, I'm only landing glancing blows. There are fans out there who truly count Spectres as a disappointment, or even a betrayal to BOC's roots. I could never be so hard on an album I've listened to countless times, one that set me off on a journey to fandom (and beyond) and most importantly, one that unfailingly evokes the most pleasurable of memories.