The Sinister Urge

After having presumably spent the last three years in his cave biting the heads off something or other, the ex-White Zombie frontman, born Robert Cummings, returns with his much-anticipated second solo album. And guess what? He’s only brought friends Ozzy, Tommy Lee and Slayer’s Kerry King along for the ride.

On first listening, The Sinister Urge just sounds like a mess of over-optimistic clanging, cheesy soundbites and teen-angst-type roaring. Monologues and film extracts aside, it is extremely short and for a Zombie creation, has very few pure rock moments.

The rushing ‘Dead Girl Superstar’ (Alice Cooper, is that you?), which finds Kerry King living out all his fantasies with a twanging guitar solo that Slash would be proud of, is addictive and thrashing. The Nadsat-splattered ‘Never Gonna Stop’ has some groovy bass and seems to be pitched as the album’s first release. My personal favourite, the sexy ‘(Go To) California’ is hypnotic and shows a welcome new direction for the king of horror.

But the rest of the album is dissapointing for someone with the imagination and experience of Zombie.

Ozzy’s talent is wasted on the right-back-atcha duet ‘Ironhead’, an unintelligible mess that thinks that by chanting “crucify” and “exterminate” enough times it can scare you into liking it. ‘Bring Her Down (to Crippletown)’ (ab)uses a 30-piece orchestra to back up boring, repetitive vocals. The last track on the album is called ‘House of 1000 Corpses’, and tells the pleasant tale of a family of cannibals and their victims. Let’s just say that after ten minutes of fake news reports, screams, the token child’s laughter and eerie minor piano, it made even me want to eat my own face. After three years, Zombie may have risen from the dead, but only just.