This album fucking owns.
That’s it. That’s all you need.
OK, I’ll try to explain just why Astro-Creep: 2000 (full subtitle: Songs of Love, Destruction, and Other Synthetic Delusions of the Electric Head) is such a great album, just how White Zombie created something special here. The band had been around for a decade and began much noisier before putting some pop in their groove trash metal on 1992’s La Sexorcisto: Devil Music Volume One. As that title indicates, this was not exactly a huge mainstream concession. La Sexorcisto is a great album, but Andy Wallace’s production sounds muted to my ears. It doesn’t give something like the badass “Black Sunshine” enough full-throated roar. Terry Date produced Astro-Creep: 2000 and maybe he makes things a bit shinier — keyboards add texture to the songs, guitars are jagged yet thick — but with the aim of getting this shit absolutely blasting out of your headphones and speakers.
This combines with new drummer John Tempesta’s heavier hits, which shift the songs from a groove to more of an industrial stomp. Sean Yseult’s bass is a bit less prominent on an individual level, but this is also a function of the heavy downtuning throughout the album — that’s anchored by her low churn. You can hear where Rob Zombie’s solo career would go in this pummeling, but guitarist J. Yuenger provides a crucial contribution: FUCKIN RIFFS: Sabbathy in menace but with speedier metal strumming, chainsaws that snap your neck as they jerk in and out of your ears, like in “Creature of the Wheel.”
And Rob Zombie himself provides the swagger. His gravelly shouts and leering sneers are as much a part of the rhythm as the rest of the band. He uses “Yeah!” like a splash cymbal. Zombie sings about sex and violence, degradation and devils, but with a sense of gnarly glee. “Clowns, they scare the children/Roll around the ring./The animals, they want to kill/Anyone, anything,” “Slung low like a whore, yeah/Devil want some more, yeah/Cupid bought a gun, he gonna blow the fucker” — this is the language of the grindhouse, and White Zombie’s songs are full of movie samples that add an extra charge, like Christopher Lee’s seething “It is not heresy, and I will not…recant!” The lyrics aren’t exactly poetic meditations on addiction and abandonment (although album closer “Blood Milk and Sky” and its invocation ”beauty never dies” does strike a more somber tone) and they should not be. There is too much ass to be kicked here.
“More Human Than Human” is not just the biggest hit here by far, and not just in White Zombie’s catalog overall. It’s the defining song of the strip club music — in hell! aesthetic. Yuenger’s sleazy slide riff is countered by his thunderous downstrokes in sync with Yseult and Tempesta’s beat, and Zombie’s vocals are rap-indebted in the way of a lot of La Sexorcisto songs. Other tracks are more straightforwardly assaultive, like “Super-Charger Heaven” or “I, Zombie,” with the occasional pullback like “Greasepaint and Monkey Brains” or “Blur the Technicolor” riding slower if no less heavy grooves. There is variation between tracks but also a consistent mood of revelry in destruction, of overwhelming, extremely rad malevolence. Some hero uploaded the entire album on YouTube, and a comment underneath describes the atmosphere here better than any critic: “I remember starting Resident Evil 1 on the PlayStation, and popping in this CD in my Sony Discman, and jamming while running thru the mansion killing zombies and mutated frogs,” the anonymous writer recalls. “This whole album matches up with that game very well…..great times.”
There is nostalgia here, and why not? Those do sound like pretty fucking great times. I’ve listened to this album for the better part of 30 years and anything with that kind of longevity will carry history along with its artistic qualities. But I remember throwing it on a decade or so ago after not listening to it for some time, ready to indulge past glories, and instead discovering something remarkable. The album still rocked the exact same way for me at 30 as it had when I was 15, and as it does now that I’m 40. The riffs, the samples, the beats, the power — what they create is somehow still fresh.
You can’t step into the same river twice, the saying goes. So much art gains meaning as you change, through the interplay of your life and its stages with the fixed perspective of the film or the recording or the painting. A book you read as a child is not the same book you read as a parent; the movie you watched with your partner is not the movie you watch when they’re gone. We are the river, and we have become something else whenever the art steps into us: we see it from a different point of view or with new knowledge. But what Astro-Creep celebrates and evokes is unchanging. If that is simple, it is also unique and worth treasuring.
My favorite song on the album is “Electric Head, Pt. 2 (The Ecstasy),” which Wikipedia tells me was the album’s second single (new knowledge!) though I have no memory of hearing it on the radio. It’d be hard to forget in that context — the song opens with John Shaft himself snarling “I just said, ‘Up yours, baby,’” and then immediately launches into a ferocious ascending riff with descending bass counterpoint, the drums hitting a gut-punching swing that is nearly disco in its rhythm (pointing the way toward nü-metal in general and KoRn’s “Got The Life” in particular). “Strip down core, violate and paralyze/Flood my soul a coffee dreg, super size,” Zombie bellows. “Yeah/I want it/Yeah/I need it/Yeah/I love it.” Every time I hear the song, it really does flood my soul with adrenaline and a savage, joyful bellicosity, that riff redlining for four minutes of a high that has never lost its potency.
And sometimes that’s all you need. That’s it.
This album fucking owns.