Rob Zombie - The Lunar Injection Kool Aid Eclipse Conspiracy
Album review by; Mike
To begin… A gripe… always a good way to start!
It’s been five years since the last offering, ‘The Electric Warlock Acid Witch Satanic Orgy Celebration Dispenser’ and to call it an album would be a stretch, with it just squeaking past the 30-minute mark…
The majority of the tracks felt like a collection of movie trailers… songs that were never fleshed out to their full potential. It felt like ‘diet’ Zombie… and as good as it was, I wanted the sugar, I needed the caffeine!
Gripe ends…
As one of the undead, it allows a musician like Rob Zombie to keep going and going… forever… much like the Energizer Bunny! Sheri –Moon is a lucky gal!
The zombie state allows for longevity, so much so that we find Zombie and his cohorts returning for their seventh studio album.
‘The Lunar Injection Kool Aid Conspiracy’
And if you think the album title is a mouthful… wait till you get a load of those song titles…. Someone slipped something into the Kool Aid… and whatever it was… I want to know where they got it from!
As the imagination deployed is evidence of a chaotically creative brain at work.
In an interview Mr Zombie claims, that in his opinion - ‘The Lunar Injection’, is the best record we’ve ever made. We’ve worked on it for a long time. The songs are very catchy, but the structures are way more complex than they have been in the past. It’s kind of all over the place. I think the fans are going to love it!”
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A welcomed opportunity then to delve right into what Rob, John 5, Piggy D and Gingerfish with production maestro Zeuss on the control desk have accomplished.
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And for the sake of brevity, we’ll keep the review to the tracks rather than the interludes.
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An Arabian inspired guitar line drones with an accompanying Middle Eastern beat that spawns into heavy riffage that harks back to the days of White Zombie.
It’s the lead track off the album and one can imagine Rob casting himself within the titular role of ‘The King Freak’… basking in the revelry as the hordes of fans in unison repeat the lyric over and over again, cementing his legacy as the self-appointed and rightly anointed monarch!
The production is epic, meddling all manner of genres from funk to hip hop to 70’s rock, which make it ubiquitously Zombie-esque.
Very crazy, very cool…
The Eternal Struggles of the Howling Man
Channelling his inner Matthew McConaughey with the lyric ‘alright alright, alright’… we venture into the heart of the monster, the beast of burden borne by the lycanthropic...
It's another genre melding trip with a stylish funk infused middle eight… he wasn’t kidding when he mentioned that some tracks do indeed have levels of complexity not yet witnessed on previous releases, as evidenced here...
The lyric of ‘Power to the people’ sounds somewhat trite in today's world of globalization, but the hippie in me acknowledges the sentiment
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In essence it should have been a 20-minute prog-rock odyssey with its homage to Evel Knievel…but with the scythe of the edit, the track is distilled to a four-and-a-half-minute run time allowing it to evade all fear of taking a silver bullet… Full Moon Fever indeed!
The Ballad of Sleazy Rider
‘Rama-lama, rama-lama-loo…’ we are back in the domain of undecipherable lyrics and crunching tones sprinkled with a dusting of electronica to elevate the anti-hero of the 'Sleazy Rider' to that of horror bubble rock mythos…
You would definitely enjoy the company of the aforementioned protagonist for an evening's worth of debauchery but I’m sure that come the morning, his indelible mark would have left a stain on your soul!
Good times! The highlight for the track being the segue into what can only be described as a gospel spiritual… it's all clapping hands with a soloed vocal!
Shadow Of The Cemetery Man
“I Don’t give a fuck and I AINT EVER GROWING OLD!”
The lyrics quoted pretty much sum up the entire song…. No more explanation required… its necessary nonsense…
"18th Century Cannibals, Excitable Morlocks and a One-Way Ticket on the Ghost Train"
Sounding like the start of the BBC TV show, 'The Old Grey Whistle Test', is no bad thing.
Love a bit of western harmonica, which spills over into western inspired licks that give John 5 the opportunity to utilize his chicken picking guitar technique.
All you need is some moonshine, and a 70’s Dodge charger and you could find yourself in an episode of the 'Dukes of Hazzard' trying to outrun the law!
It’s a hoe down! Roll on the pig wrestling!
It’s a welcomed curve ball of a track…
And coming from a similar leftfield is…
The Much Talked Of Metamorphosis.
Once again John 5 steps up to the spotlight to showcase his skill sets, with a Spanish guitar inspired acoustic number, which wouldn’t be out of place in a Sergio Leone film; it’s a welcome rest bite from the groove metal disco and affords the album a greater depth and a moment to reflect…
The Satanic Rites Of Blacula
IT’S WAY TOO SHORT… AND IT RUINS THE GROOVE…
You could of, easily added an extra verse and chorus to flesh it out… but having said that it is extremely reminiscent of a stripped down ‘Dragula’.
Shake Your Ass-Smoke Your Grass
It’s time for a Burundi beat and despite the vocal interludes its absolute gibberish… with crazy sound effects and a guitar lick which sounds very Deep Purple-esque... it's another track that is over before it’s begun…
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Boom- Boom- Boom
Kicks the BPM down a couple of gears, and as great as a song about a witch can be, think Fleetwood Mac’s 'Rihanna' for a reference point, it would work well as background music for a slow-mo-sequence in an action film… Music for a Mexican standoff if I ever heard it!
Crow Killer Blues
By far the heaviest track on the album. Full of gothic organs and pinch harmonics, very BLS, with a debt to Black Sabbath, it's chocked full of all the quintessential production tricks that makes ‘Zombie’ sound like it does… absolute head banger!
But for all its positives what are the negatives?
If you expect your album to have a greater sense of cohesion… an envelope that seamlessly makes all the disparate elements form together in a syngeneic unison, then it’s a no.
The album really is all over the place… its kitsch and its kooky… much like an ex-girlfriend.
Will it stand the test of time and have you returning to it in its entirety in one session? Doubtful?
Will it have you keen and ready to see ‘Rob Zombie’ when they roll back into your town? Absolutely!
It’s an album of parts and sequences which one just wishes added up to a greater sum for the whole!
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Pre-order The Lunar Injection Kool Aid Eclipse Conspiracy HERE
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The Lunar Injection Kool Aid Eclipse Conspiracy tracklist;
1) Expanding the Head of Zed
2) The Triumph of King Freak (A Crypt of Preservation and Superstition)
3) The Ballad of Sleazy Rider
4) Hovering Over the Dull Earth
5) Shadow of the Cemetery Man
6) A Brief Static Hum and Then the Radio Blared
7) 18th Century Cannibals, Excitable Morlocks and a One-Way Ticket On the Ghost Train
8) The Eternal Struggles of the Howling Man
9) The Much Talked of Metamorphosis
10) The Satanic Rites of Blacula
11) Shower of Stones
12) Shake Your Ass-Smoke Your Grass
13) Boom-Boom-Boom
14) What You Gonna Do with That Gun Mama
15) Get Loose
16) The Serenity of Witches
17) Crow Killer Blues
Rob Zombie Online;
instagram.com/robzombieofficial
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