At first glance, one might assume that everything is just business as usual for Rob Zombie on his sixth solo studio album. Its title, The Electric Warlock Acid Witch Satanic Orgy Celebration Dispenser, reads like a compilation of words pulled from the titles of his other albums and seems a little laughable and ridiculous, at first. Likewise, the same could be said of all twelve of the titles that the songs on the album have been christened with: “Well, Everybody’s Fucking in a U.F.O.,” “Satanic Cyanide! The Killer Rocks On!,” “A Hearse Overturns with the Coffin Bursting Open” and “Get Your Boots On! That’s The End of Rock n’ Roll” all read as a little silly, or like something that The Flaming Lips may have come up with while hung over on an especially bad day (“In A Priest-Driven Ambulance” or “The Train Runs Over the Camel But Is Derailed by the Gnat” anyone?). Because of all that (before a note a note of music has been heard), it’s hard to know what might have possessed Rob Zombie to play against his own type; one goofy song title is one thing, but this? This is something else.
As silly as some of what listeners see before they actually listen to the album might be, they’ll find they will have no choice but to change their collective tune after they begin listening to The Electric Warlock Acid Witch Satanic Orgy Celebration Dispenser. Nothing about the music on this album is a laughing matter.
While “The Last of the Demons Defeated” doesn’t exactly explode to open the album (the lyric sheet is really little more than the album title repeated a few times over some metallic overture work by guitarist John 5, bassist Piggy D and drummer Ginger Fish), “Satanic Cyanide (The Killer Rocks On!)” makes up for the slow start by presenting a molten, metal anthem more “classic metal” centered than anything Rob Zombie has ever attempted before. Lines like “Delilah slides from the clam body dripping/ Nothing ever happens on Mars when you’re tripping/ Electro-kick with a skeleton massage/ Paint it all black and crawl from the wreckage” aren’t exactly rocket science, but they’re head-and-shoulders more literate than previous examples like “Living Dead Girl,” “Dragula,” “Sic Bubblegun” and “Mars Needs Women” and, to seal the deal, the music which backs them is realtime hard rock as dense as granite. The only comparison between the sound that “Satanic Cyanide” acheives and everything else in Zombie’s catalogue is that there is no comparison to make.
…And, as good as it is, “Satanic Cyanide” is quickly revealed to be the light end of the spectrum contained on The Electric Warlock Acid Witch Satanic Orgy Celebration Dispenser – the album just gets harder and harder and steps up its game with each successive track. “Life And Times of a Teenage Rock God” pushes the mania and immediacy levels of the music up a bit more (although plods a bit due to the way the title lyric is delivered) before the band really goes for broke and runs through the series of “Well, Everybody’s Fucking in a U.F.O.” (which sounds a bit like a disgruntled, metallic answer to “Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver” by Primus), “The Hideous Exhibitions of a Dedicated Gore Whore” (which cuts a great, heavy rock track with a cool keyboard performance), the close-to-shred “Medication for the Melancholy”, the late White Zombie throwback “In The Age of the Consecrated Vampire, We All Get High” and the Hollywood hard rock workshop “In The Bone Pile” in a way which can’t really be called an easy extension of where fans may have thought Zombie would be headed after Venomous Rat Regeneration Vendor hit in 2013, but it’s definitely an excellent one. Even as “Wurdalak” launches the album into oblivion to close it out, listeners will find that just once through the album wasn’t enough; they’ll come back to inhabit what The Electric Warlock Acid Witch Satanic Orgy Celebration Dispenser is peddling and simultaneously hope that the phrase scripted on the disc – “the final decline and total collapse” – isn’t true and there will still be more music coming from Rob Zombie.
(T-Boy/UMe)
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