Back In Black - AC/DC

 

Provenance: No big story behind this one, I'm afraid. The story is that this is the sixth-biggest selling album ever, and it's by AC/DC. 

Review: This one should be easy, no? It's baby's first hard rock record. It's part of the headbanger's canon. No self-respecting air-guitarist would go without.

However, I have been a bit of a contrarian in the past, making sport of sacred cows such as Deep Purple and Kiss. At least I haven't doled out any shoeings as a pose; my opinions may seem wrongheaded to you, fair reader, but they're forged in white heat of honesty. So with that being said, what do I find amiss with Back In Black?

Er, nothing much. It's pretty fantastic.

As a fan, I hold the uncontroversial opinion that Bon Scott was the greater frontman whilst maintaining that Back In Black is the best overall AC/DC album. This, despite the fact that, with the advent of Brian Johnson, its shorn of many of the aspects Scott brought to the band that made them so indelibly AC/DCish - the boozy bonhomie, leery (albeit often self-deprecating) innuendo and a bucketload of sleaze. Johnson is a different beast altogether, a man who sounds on the brink of imploding every time he opens his mouth, as strained and intense as Scott was relaxed and cheery. Upon listening today, it struck me as it never has before that Johnson actually sounds a fair bit like Dan McCafferty of Nazareth, another fella who sounded like he was dying every time he sang.

So what makes Back In Black so good? Some obvious points - catchy, precision-tooled riffs in every song; a big, roomy production coupled with unfussy music; the eye-popping weirdness of Brian Johnson; and the fact that, amidst the heavy blooz 'n' bluster, there can be detected the occasional stab at grandeur. There's a quality approaching stateliness in 'Hell's Bells' and 'Rock 'N' Roll Ain't Noise Pollution', a quality that even the tautology of the latter's chorus line cannot diminish. Back In Black was the first AC/DC album after Scott's passing, and the tolling of the bell that signifies the start of the album pulses with a rare power, no matter how many times you care to listen.

I should also observe that some of the plus points I've briefly sketched out would prove the seeds of AC/DC's downfall as a creative force, even as they became the stadium behemoth they are today. As with Def Leppard's Hysteria, also produced by Mutt Lange, Back In Black is shorn of any twisty intricacy - not that AC/DC would ever be confused with Bach, but this is definitely them at their most stripped-back. It works here, bold riffs against a stark canvas, but on later albums where the ideas weren't quite up to snuff, it began to sound boring.

Likewise, where Brian Johnson sounds quite demented here, there's little variation from album to album. Again, the effect wore off, and whilst a better singer in technical terms than Bon Scott, he doesn't possess Scott's ability with mood, colour and shading. Feel free to disagree with me on this, but I've listened to a whole lotta DC, and these are the conclusions I've reached. Also, whilst commendably keeping the spirit of sleaziness alive, 'Let Me Put My Love Into You' and 'Givin' the Dog a Bone' barely reach the qualifying bar for single-entendre. Still, very good rock songs both!

Listen to me, harping on about all the things AC/DC did subsequent to Back In Black. Suffice it to say, I can't add much to the fund of knowledge about the album - it's there, it's brilliant, and right now around the world fumbled attempts at 'Back In Black' emanate from one thousand guitar shops. I suppose it's remarkable in the sense that it's both an elegy and a celebration, yet never comes across as either mawkish or, at the other end of the spectrum, inconsiderate. How do you mourn the death of your revered frontman? By making one of the greatest rock and roll records of the era. 

Destroyer - Kiss

 

Provenance: Lost to the mists of time. There's no great story behind this one. I suspect I bought it after enjoying Kiss' Double Platinum compilation.

Review: Five-and-a-half years ago I reviewed Destroyed by Sloppy Seconds, which features cover art that sends-up that of Destroyer. Sloppy Seconds were (are?) a scrappy Indianapolis punk band with a cult following. Kiss are globe-bestriding monsters of arena rock. Yet the Sloppy Seconds offering knocks this into a cocked hat. In this instance, the apprentice quite easily bests the master.

On the basis of this (and the other Kiss album I've reviewed so far) I can only conclude that the band's enduring popularity is built squarely on their Alive! series of live recordings. Why? Because in the studio, they were absolute tripe.

There are precisely two listenable songs on Destroyer - opener 'Detroit Rock City' and 'Shout It Out Loud'. The former is a song I could listen to practically any time of day or night, although I could do without the prelude. This consists of a whole minute of your life listening to a fake radio station and the most underpowered car in the world starting up. It sounds like the pump in my fish tank. However, once into the meat of the track it's a different story - a headrush of cool bass riffs, hysterical vocals and drink driving. It even squeezes in Space Ace (maybe?) playing a distinctive, flamenco-tinged solo. It would be reasonable to surmise after this barnstorming opener that the rest of Destroyer is gonna rock.

Well, sorry to dash your cherished hopes 'n' dreams, because it's a precipitous slide downhill thereafter. It's not that the songs are, in and of themselves, terrible, once you remove lyrics, singing and execution from the mix.

To give 'King of the Night Time World' its due, it's about the last time 'Starchild' Paul Stanley sounds relatively human. It would even be a decent song if played by a decent band. But this is Kiss, starring Peter Criss on drums, a guy who makes Moe Tucker sound like Terry Bozzio. Bob Ezrin does his best to bury some of the more rancid stuff, but his 'jazz influenced' hi-hat work is splashed across 'King...' like puttanesca sauce down a crisp white t-shirt. Next up is 'God of Thunder', with Gene Simmons sounding like he's trying to burp up a hot-dog over the a plodding backbeat.

However - at least these are, at a foundational level, heavy rock songs, no matter how ham-handed they've been rendered. What the fuck is 'Great Expectations'? It's sopping wet, with a syrupy string arrangement and underscored by a horrid, shrill choir. I don't know what it's trying to achieve other than being the most suck-ass thing ever committed to vinyl; and even then it's a failure, because it's not even the biggest pile of horseshit on Destroyer. 'Flaming Youth' is okay, I guess, if you like Sweet b-sides sung by Paul Lynde. 'Sweet Pain' meanwhile just sounds inept; how Bob Ezrin heard this and thought "yeah, that sounds like four guys all playing in the same room at the same time" is a mystery.

At least there is some respite in the form of the aforementioned 'Shout It Out Loud', which is gloriously dumb, as opposed to plain dumb - a big, hooky invitation to get down and party, Kiss-style! What makes this track pop so much - the maracas? No matter, 'Shout It Out Loud' has got the wow factor - a cool descending piano riff, a chorus so sticky that even the Men In Black would struggle to wipe it from memory and handclaps that seem to be in the right place. It's an island of fun and kineticism in an ocean of sclerosis. Perhaps Destroyer finishes on a flourish..

Hol' up, there, pard'ner! This here's 'Beth' country! Yes, 'Beth', winner of a People's Choice Award in 1977, is a proper stinker. It makes 'Great Expectations' sound like Napalm Death, a track that Captain and Tennille would've rejected for being too drippy. Peter Criss gets to sing, which could be fine, as he did the lead vocals on actual good song 'Black Diamond'. Alas, here he seems to think he's the next Rod Stewart, croaking away over a sea of piano 'n' strings schmaltz. It's the nadir not only of Destroyer but 1970s rock - which whips ass in general - altogether. Here's a fun call back: 'Beth' made its US television debut on the Paul Lynde Halloween Special, where Kiss performed alongside such luminaries as Florence Henderson, Billy Barty and the Osmonds. (In the interests of fairness and balance, here's Kiss doing a great mime job with 'Detroit Rock City' on the same show.)

'Beth' isn't the final word on Destroyer - that honour goes to 'Do You Love Me?', which is alright-ish but like trying to wash your mouth out with a thimble of Listerine after gargling sewage for three whole minutes. It would play better for me today if I didn't believe Paul Stanley sincerely meant every single narcissistic word. 

Apparently many Kiss fans think Destroyer is the band's best studio album. God almighty! You know, I might actually prefer Hot In The Shade (though I'm in no massive hurry to confirm this). Clearly - and it's obvious from live footage - Kiss are a band best witnessed in person, all their theatrics and whizz-bangs undoubtedly part of the appeal. Hell, I've seen 'em live and it was top entertainment. The bones of good rock songs are there on Destroyer, and they become fully-fleshed in the live arena. Nonetheless when sat at home, listening to their studio efforts, Kiss come across as a pallid, even timid, version of themselves.

Born In The USA - Bruce Springsteen

 

Provenance: I bought this with my own hard-earned piastres but to this day couldn't tell you why. It was a music shop purchase, so I was surrounded by scores of albums I coveted more than Born In The USA; an aberration, then, like much of my life.

Review: Here's a strange one - an album I like a lot, perhaps even love, to the almost complete exclusion of everything else Bruce Springsteen has done.

I consider the E Street Band to be one of the most overrated bodies within the firmament of rock 'n' roll. I don't know how anyone could abide three hours of their dreary, churning mediation of the genre.

Furthermore, I don't think I can really talk to anyone about the Boss. Here in the UK, I've often found people who are big into Bruce Springsteen a bit suspect, like Tex from I'm Alan Partridge, the guy who "likes American stuff." Undoubtedly, in this instance, I'm the weird one projecting my anxieties about the romanticised version of the USA onto the uncomplicated tastes in music of others, but whatever; if you're a Brit and you like Springsteen, in my stupid mind at least, you're a rube.

But listen, don't let me get too high-handed here; I'm prey to exactly the same mythologies, and even attempted to justify getting misty-eyed about eagles soaring over the Tuvan steppe in my Huun Huur Tu review. Maybe, just maybe, I've found it easier to resist the allure of the whole 'cruisin' down Route 66' view of America because I've actually been to places like Kansas. As a visitor I can never truly grapple with the reality of life in the Midwest, of course, but becoming personally acquainted with a place and its people is the next best thing. 

On a vaguely related note, actually going to the Mississippi Delta brought me round to finding much of the mythos are blues music quite distasteful. The ink spilled on rather purple descriptions of living conditions of southern Blacks, coupled with an inference that in one or two instances a supernatural assist was required, creates a kind of gothic romance that thoroughly dehumanises the protagonists. Fundamentally, we're talking about talented human beings very much plugged into the commercial realities of the time and place they found themselves, as opposed to the ethereal musical cryptids that a few have become.

How to sum up these ramblings? Perhaps, that America tells good stories about itself. 

Bruce Springsteen also tells good stories, very good in fact, considering that he's had no firsthand experience of the lives led by the blue collar heroes and heroines who populate his songs. For all the guff about lumber yards and construction, he has about as much familiarity with the ins and outs of manual labour as Joan Baez. Which is fine, because he's a musician; we don't make the demand that KISS are actually kabuki space aliens, so why the purity test for ol' Bruce? He's the KISS of the workingman, with better lyrics and worse music.

At times, Springsteen's facility with a story is great - witness the mounting desperation and breakdown of 'Downbound Train', the best track on the album, or the knockabout update to Eddie Cochrane's sound on 'Working On The Highway' which masks a tale about contravening the Mann Act. The latter is fun, because much like Sparks or Cheap Trick, it demonstrates an ability to wrap a spiky subject in a sweet melody. You know, I'll even put 'Glory Days' in the 'great song' category, but the meditation on reflecting upon one's flaming youth only starts to make sense (like Bob Seger's music) when you've got a few miles on the clock. Now, the KISS song 'Flaming Youth'? You can enjoy that at any age.

However, much of the remainder gives me pause. Is 'Darlington County' anything more than a raucous pub rocker? Probably not. A couple of charlies drive to South Carolina looking for work, give it the big 'I am' with the locals and promptly fuck off - that's the song, albeit we've got cops, unions and the Fourth of July thrown in for good measure. Even some of the songs that come across as a celebration of male virility, 'Dancing In The Dark' and 'I'm On Fire', sound like the internal monologue of yer da sizing himself up in front of the mirror before happy hour at the Fat Ox.

The less said about the title track, the better. Just like N'Golo Kante is the least underrated underrated player in the Premier League, 'Born In The USA' is the least misunderstood misunderstood song in rock history.  The only reason it has its reputation is that idiots contrive to keep playing it in inappropriate situations. Or maybe they are appropriate, and the likes of Ronnie Reagan was providing a slick meta-commentary to his own neoliberal policy positions? Oh well, never mind, there are plenty of other tracks campaigning politicians can reach for that are far less problematic - how about Neil Young's 'Rockin' In The Free World', that sounds unambiguously fine...

The reason, then, that I still like Born In The USA is that when Springsteen finds his mark as a storyteller he's surgical in his dissection of not just the actions but the psychology of his subjects; and when he is a bit clumsy, you've still got a pretty decent racket backing him up. As much as I do find the E Street Band a fairly turgid proposition, their prosaic accompaniment suits the mood here, a few clangy keyboard tones aside. 

Ultimately, it's entertainment. The music coming out of my speakers does not distort due to a lack of literal truth or authenticity. Approach Bruce Springsteen as you would Alice Cooper - substituting the guillotines and sabres for tales of road maintenance and union dues - and you're golden.

Good Bye - Flied Egg

 

Provenance: The ol' noggin ain't what it used to be, so no amount of staring into the black depths of this slightly forbidding album cover will lead to an eureka moment, I fear. However, it's certainly a pre-Spotify purchase, which leads me to two hypotheses:

1. Some random shit I heard on YouTube

2. (The most likely) I read about a band called Flied Egg and thought "I'd better get a piece of this".

It's a strange name for a band, right? Flied Egg. It turns out they were a Japanese outfit from the early 1970s, so it's either with a degree of irony or defiance that they took their language's difficulty with distinguishing between 'l' and 'r' and flipped it into a quirky handle. One feels that in our more enlightened (I say, the day after hordes of people marched in London against a make-believe Satanic cannibal paedophile (or should that be paedophile cannibal?) cabal) age such a name might be consigned to the 'bad idea' pile fairly swiftly, but who knows? If anybody has the right to lampoon Japanese speech patterns it's Japanese people themselves, and to me it feels like a nice mixture of absurdity, self-deprecation and spikiness. Is that reflected in the music, eh?

Review: Here's one of those curios that seem to have gone extinct, alongside 'hidden tracks' and CDs that you could turn over to the watch a music video - the half live, half studio effort. Good Bye starts with a bit of a bummer, as an MC announces that 'this show is going to be recorded, and will appear on the final LP this band will be released'. Yeah mate, not quite 'you wanted the best?! You got the best!' or 'on your feet - or on your knees!', but I should mark it up for being factually correct (this was Flied Egg's second - and final - album) and creating a sense of occasion.

Unfortunately, the first couple of tracks aren't anything special - aside from some peculiar wailing in the backing vocals department, it's fairly pedestrian 'eavy blooz rock in the same vein as Bachman-Turner Overdrive or Grand Funk Railroad. A fairly pointless cover of B.B. King's 'Rock Me Baby' follows - I already have superior versions by King, Robin Trower and myself playing into a dictaphone to fall back on. The soloing is energetic enough but quite generic; it has none of the identifiable quirkiness of King's restrained, vibrato-rich style or the artistry of Trower's mind-bending, feedback-soaked real-time deconstruction of the blues.

Another fairly muddy track closes out side A, but this time we're treated to a boring drum solo and some meandering nonsense on guitar. It's all very 1972 - an era where bands seemed to confuse lengthy jamming with fun, interesting music. Nothing to me sounds more brain-achingly langweilig than watching Jimmy Page stumble over his fretboard for half an hour in some godforsaken concert arena in the Midwest, but apparently people went nuts for this kind of bullshit. At least on studio albums, bands like Zep and the Allmans were largely constrained by the format, but you check out something like Deep Purple's Made In Japan and see twelve and a half minutes of 'Child In Time' or, heaven forbid, twenty minutes of 'Space Truckin'' and your fucking spider senses are tingling so hard that the structural integrity of your body is compromised and you become a puddle of goo. Which, I should add, is preferable to listening to Made In Japan.

Side B is the studio stuff! On Alive II, possibly the best album KISS ever put out, you've got a very solid studio side - 'All American Man' (despite being unintentionally funny, it's a corker), 'Rockin' in the USA' and the splendid Space Ace fronted number 'Rocket Ride'. Good Bye doesn't quite scrape the firmament in the same way, alas. More production line hard rock with 'Before You Descend', which then gives way to a genuinely nice moment called 'Out To The Sea', sporting a fairly grand arrangement underscored by swelling Hammond organ surges.

The next track is the one that set me off, though - Flied Egg totally bin off all the rawk for a bizarre interlude called 'Goodbye My Friends', which feels like nothing more than a prank. Played on what might be a clavinet or electric harpsichord, it's like someone decided that what Good Bye really needed was a tribute to Engelbert Humperdinck or Tony Orlando and Dawn. Chintzy, schmaltzy, out of tune, it comes across like a Sacha Baron Cohen bit being played out for some hicktown unsuspecting rubes, but I think it's entirely done in earnest. It's altogether quite charming as a consequence.

Of course, Good Bye doesn't actually sign off with the 'so long, adieu!' ditty, because this ain't the summer of love, pal, so instead we're left with the '521 Seconds Schizophrenic Symphony' to remember Flied Egg by. It's divided into four movements, just like the most tedious Kansas tracks (or entire Gryphon albums), which each have their own flavour, I suppose. There's a quiet bit (nice acoustic guitar work, I concede), the bit with some cod-Bach organ work and a predictably pompous, bathetic conclusion, fizzy with the crash of cymbals and, called the 'Finale'. If you've ever seen the likes of Mountain work themselves up into a froth, you know exactly what this sounds like.

What else can I say? Flied Egg sound like they're going to be fun, but they're not. There's one good track on Good Bye ('Out To The Sea') and one very, very bad track influenced equally by Eurovision and your local supermarket's cheese aisle ('Goodbye My Friends'), and that's it. Don't buy this album, I won't enrich your life in any way. There's nothing more that needs saying, really. Good bye.

Opus Eponymous - Ghost

Provenance: For a band who I've followed avidly since they first burst onto the scene about ten years ago, my memories of how I became with Ghost acquainted are fuzzy.

I certainly recall my first live encounter with the band - March 2013, when they headlined that year's Jagermeister Tour; support acts were Gojira and The Defiled. Caught it down in Bournemouth with a few friends and family, tickets costing a princely five quid. Even back then, Ghost put on a hell of a show.

Anyway, last month I spent a week in North Macedonia and listened to fourth album Prequelle on the flights there and back. Having initially dismissed the latest as a bit ballad-heavy, I am now inclined to see it as their strongest album to date. So, having recently used this blog to pretend that I'm an adult with grown-up tastes, I now think it's time to check out a bunch of Scandinavians who wear masks and pretend to worship Satan.

Review: Prior to pressing 'play' on my stereo, I had a horrible impression that I was going to be less than fair with Opus Eponymous. What I saw in Bournemouth all those years ago was exciting and theatrical, but absolutely nothing like the slick outfit Ghost have subsequently become (I saw them in Brighton a couple of years ago for significantly more than a Lady Godiva). Likewise, the music on Prequelle is rich in texture and nuance, great swathes of orchestration wrapping around songs that have one eye on the charts (NB: this album didn't do any business in the US, whilst Prequelle peaked at number three on the Billboard Top 200).

Then again, at this point in time, there was still a lot of fun to be had around Ghost's identities. Taking a leaf out of the Kiss playbook, the songwriting on Opus Eponymous was credited to 'a Ghoul Writer'; the frontman was the mysterious Papa Emeritus, and the band referred to as 'a host of Nameless Ghouls'. Furthermore, the album sported cool artwork and reinvigorated a strain of metal that could be subtle yet heavy, sinister yet campy and unafraid to revel in showmanship. In short, they basically revived 1972-77 era Blue Oyster Cult, but this time, with added devilry.

(Even the symbol Ghost use has a touch of the Kronos motif Blue Oyster Cult deployed on all their albums. Catnip for BOC geeks such as myself.)

I don't think it comes as a surprise that a collection quite so schlocky as Opus Eponymous opens up with a church organ dirge. Pretty standard stuff, really, when it comes to albums that celebrate Old Nick. All well and good for setting the scene, but it's over quite quickly and we're into the galloping 'Con Clavi Con Dio', which is what all of us in the peanut gallery came for. It's fucking badass - and makes me realise that although Ghost were working with a much more basic palette than on subsequent releases, that ability to fuse tunefulness and heaviness was there from the word go. One suspects that were this to appear on Meliora or Prequelle, it would be washed with keyboards and other such orchestration. One thing that does stand out is that the music has more 'gaps' than the thick tapestry of sound that typifies later releases.

Still, this no-frills approach gives it a pleasingly retro feel. Vocals aside, much of Opus Eponymous sounds like it could've been disinterred from the mid-1970s, or maybe the first dark flowering of the NWOBHM. This ersatz dustiness - a false vintage - perhaps puts Ghost, at least here, in the bracket of some kind of eldritch Sha Na Na, inviting the listener on a journey to a time that never quite took place in the first place. I'm not suggesting for a moment that Ghost belong in any serious kind of discussion about hauntology but their Blue Oyster Cult cosplay act is damn convincing.

I keep mentioning BOC here, and at this juncture I should also throw in other obvious influences such as Mercyful Fate, Alice Cooper, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, Slayer; they're all there. But - but - but - you can taste the fact that Tobias Forge (the leader and frontman of Ghost) is intimately familiar with Long Island's finest between, especially that golden stretch between Tyranny and Mutation and Spectres. Damn it all, the keys in 'Con Clavi Con Dio' sound like they've been ripped from 'Tattoo Vampire'. Elsewhere, there are echoes of 'Flaming Telepaths', 'Career of Evil', 'Quicklime Girl' - the good news is that Forge's borrowings are from the absolute prime cuts, so it's all good. Greta Van Fleet, take note; when you want to emulate your heroes, just try and do it well in the first instance, yeah?

In any case, none of this would add up to a hill of beans if the songs aren't there - and, praise Satan, they really are. Forge isn't a screamer; in fact, for a metal singer his voice is quite soft, made even more pliant by enunciation informed by his Swedish background. However, if anything this makes the music sound even more unworldly and uncanny; compare and contrast with Kiss, who for all their attempts to shock polite society, couldn't hide the fact that they were a bunch of Noo Yawk schlubs if their lives depended on it. Instead, Forge relies on a building a sense of drama and majesty to propel his infernal ditties and it works splendidly. Ghost celebrate the Father of Lies with all the pomp and ceremony of a High Mass, and choruses to tracks such as 'Elizabeth' (about Elizabeth Bathory), 'Stand By Him' and 'Death Knell' simultaneously soar to the heavens and plumb the fiery depths.

Having listened to Opus Eponymous again, so soon after spending a lot of time with Prequelle, has brought me not only a sense of relief (i.e. that it's a banger) but also reminded me why I was so revved up by Ghost almost a decade ago. It's yanked me back to a small concert room in Bournemouth, and to marvelling at the audacity of trying to conceal the band's identities in the online age. The latter couldn't last, of course, but I enjoyed the schtick at the time. With a whiff of brimstone and a smear of greasepaint, Ghost delved backwards to bring the joy of the old-timey rock 'n' roll spectacle to the twenty-first century, for which we should all be grateful.

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...

Hot In The Shade - Kiss

Provenance: Another piece of shit I paid a quid or two for.

Review: This is rancid even by Kiss' standards. No mucking around this week with some convoluted preamble about how Bruce Kulick got me dumped or whatever, I'm going straight in on this abomination. I realise now that at the time I should've taken one look at that dorky sphinx and spent my money on a can of Pepsi.

I've been suckered by Kiss before now. I got their Double Platinum greatest hits collection as a teenager, which is bulging with catchy, if clunky, nuggets of escapist rock 'n' roll. A band that can come up with glorious trainwrecks like 'Detroit Rock City' and 'Black Diamond' had to be worth a deeper dive, right?

Eh, perhaps not. Certainly not, on the basis of Hot In The Shade (ooh, look, when you make an acronym of the title it spells 'hits' - clever boys! It's also an anagram of 'shit').

Now, even thought Hot In The Shade is an absolute goat rodeo for the most part, there are a couple of songs that aren't as unlistenable as the rest. The opener - 'Rise To It' - is serviceable single-entendre stadium fodder (the gag is that Paul Stanley can maintain an erection) and 'Hide Your Heart' is a hysterical slice of melodrama with a lyric that would embarrass a pre-verbal child, but gets by on conviction and a chorus. That's it. And those are tracks number one and three on a fifteen song slalom down Mt. Shitass. It's January, I've got the heating on low but this album has got me sweating like I'm allergic to it.

Speed up the opening riff to 'Black Diamond', tack on a terrible chorus and complain about paying taxes and you've got the essence of 'Betrayed'. I suppose it would be passable if you've never heard rock music before, or indeed, any music, ever. Try to imagine a song considered too dumb for ZZ Top's Recycler but have Gene Simmons sing it instead, and voila! You've conjured up 'Prisoner of Love'. Can it get worse? Yes. If you've ever wondered what Kiss what sound like if they did a cover of Def Leppard's 'Pour Some Sugar On Me', but somehow made that wretched ditty even more pathetic, then look no further than 'Read My Body'.

It goes on. Hitherto I've been running down the tracks in order, but really once you're past the relative highlight of 'Hide Your Heart' you can pick a song at random and I guarantee you that it'll be so bad that you will feel your IQ dropping in real time. 'Boomerang'? 'Cadillac Dreams'? 'Somewhere Between Heaven and Hell'? 'The Street Giveth and the Street Taketh Away' (yes, really)? This is the kind of music that drives people otherwise disposed towards guitar or drums to rediscover the lost art of mime.

It's not as if Kiss ever did anything revolutionary in their career - musically speaking, that is. 'I Was Made For Loving You' was a bit of a curio as a disco-rock fusion that actually works, but the real genius of Kiss lay in their onstage presentation and the way this was subsequently monetised. Chalk that up to the naked avarice of Gene Simmons and the sheer bloody-mindedness of Paul Stanley, the combination of which ensures Kiss chug on profitably to this day. Yet even though their paleo-rock of the 1970s was derivative and silly, it was distinctive. Probably the biggest crime of Hot In The Shade is that Kiss stopped playing Kiss songs and instead churned out bad parodies of songs whose formulae had proved successful for other bands. I've already mentioned Def Leppard and ZZ Top, but 'Love's A Slap In The Face' could be a Ratt outtake and 'Forever' is, ahem, "inspired" by Cheap Trick's 'The Flame'.

Alright, I've had enough. If I'm going to be charitable, I didn't cringe too much at 'Little Caesar' and whilst 'Silver Spoon' is mostly bobbins I cracked a smile at the "whoa-oh-a-whoah" chorus. If earlier in the decade (Hot In The Shade came out in 1989) Kiss revived flagging interest in their career by unmasking, this is the album that should've seen them committed to a witness protection scheme.  Hot In The Shade saw Kiss trying to play catch-up with the hairspray crowd - a mob that they could legitimately claim to have inspired - and failing miserably, depressingly. Alice Cooper pulled off this ruse (and pretty much everything else, come to think of it) much better. Utterly charmless.