REVIEW: ROB ZOMBIE – “The Electric Warlock Acid Witch Satanic Orgy Celebration Dispenser”

It must be an interesting life living in Rob Zombie‘s shoes: being on one hand a successful director, producer and screenwriter, whilst on the other a bona fide rockstar who’s headlined festivals all over the world and pummelled the charts for decades. The man is quite literally a culture machine, responsible for one of the most left-field success stories of the 90’s with White Zombie‘s ‘Astro-Creep: 2000’, a format that has been beaten to death but never matched.

Which leads me to wonder; with so much gravitas behind his accomplishments, does he really need to try so hard? The title to the latest album, (deep breath, and now…) ‘The Electric Warlock Acid Witch Satanic Orgy Celebration Dispenser’, is equal to a fourteen year old girl’s Tumblr profile with selfies of her vaping and ‘worshipping Satan’ in its edginess. In fact, much of the album follows in suit.

We get it, Rob: taking lines and smoking fat joints was controversial for about ten minutes in the 90’s, but we’ve all moved on and so should you. To further be described by the man himself as ‘our heaviest and most fucked musical monster to date’ makes me think that he either believes his audience are total idiots, or that he himself is one. Because again, doing a stupid hillbilly voice is about as crazy as buttering your bread with a spoon.

Humour can be hard to execute in music, and while it may be stunting for some, this is Zombie and he can do what he wants. An album release is just a necessary step in order to modernise the setlist and get the live machine rolling once more. But outside of all the try-hardiness and tracks that open up with samples of ‘wow, you’re a fucking whore, a fucking whore…’ in “The Hideous Exhibitions Of A Dedicated Gore Whore”, the content and sound is great and exactly what someone in ’95 would expect of him today. Tracks like “Get Your Boots On! That’s The End Of Rock And Roll” has the signature throat-of-nails roar and buzzsaw guitars that stomp and groove, ready to get an audience of 60k plus people bouncing of their feet.

If you’re a slave the audio/visual assault, rest assured that when the Rob Zombie machine comes rolling out into the USA assumedly next year, it will be packed with new and wonderful delights. Those that have seen the suitably out-there video of “Well, Everybody’s Fucking In A UFO” will know that he means business.

Unashamedly meat-headed and firmly in the ‘party metal’ bracket, Rob has found a standard for success and very much knows how to exploit it in ‘The Electric Warlock…’. We were never wanting or expecting Beethoven levels of genius in this release; just Rob doing what he has always done best. Long live The ‘Electric Head’.