More Bat out of Hell
2007-11-10
Having bought it ages ago, I've finally got around to ripping and listening to Bat out of Hell III: The Monster is Loose.
The first track (named with the album's rather tragic subtitle) begins with a blend of power chords, a slight touch of fuzz and a muted and overdriven melody evoking the same sort of feel as a nice bit of nineties black metal. The strings are there but a little subtle (and in any case not all that alien to the music I had in mind hearing it). For almost the first minute I thought that the album might be an excellent blend of that kind of broad electric momentum with the ballad-cheese that I always liked from Meat Loaf (and I'm not going to bother justifying it to you lot: I like what I like).
My neat mental house of cards tumbles when he starts singing. No matter what you do with the instruments, there's no way Meat Loaf can possibly get away from the kind of artificially epic stuff he was doing before I was born. And while the second Bat was a notable part of my early teens and the first one was a piece of history I was pleased to catch up with afterward, I haven't listened to the 1995 follow-up nearly so much. Although Bat III might be a grower, I doubt I'll give it the chance; nostalgia for eighties-style epic cheese is all well and good, but generating new examples of it in the new century seems to be missing the point.
The first track (named with the album's rather tragic subtitle) begins with a blend of power chords, a slight touch of fuzz and a muted and overdriven melody evoking the same sort of feel as a nice bit of nineties black metal. The strings are there but a little subtle (and in any case not all that alien to the music I had in mind hearing it). For almost the first minute I thought that the album might be an excellent blend of that kind of broad electric momentum with the ballad-cheese that I always liked from Meat Loaf (and I'm not going to bother justifying it to you lot: I like what I like).
My neat mental house of cards tumbles when he starts singing. No matter what you do with the instruments, there's no way Meat Loaf can possibly get away from the kind of artificially epic stuff he was doing before I was born. And while the second Bat was a notable part of my early teens and the first one was a piece of history I was pleased to catch up with afterward, I haven't listened to the 1995 follow-up nearly so much. Although Bat III might be a grower, I doubt I'll give it the chance; nostalgia for eighties-style epic cheese is all well and good, but generating new examples of it in the new century seems to be missing the point.
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