52 Albums That Shaped My Life - #30

White Zombie – Astro-Creep: 2000 – Songs of Love, Destruction and Other Synthetic
Delusions of the Electric Head

(Geffen, 1995)

Buy the album here

What is Rob Zombie even saying?  Listen to “Real Solution #9” and you’ll be none the wiser thanks to his synthesised ramblings.  Read the lyrics to “Super-Charger Heaven” and you may still be struggling:

Eye for an eye and a tooth for the tooth
I ain't never seen a demon warp dealin'
A ring a ding rhythm or jukebox, the racket
My mind can't clutch the feelin'

Go and see him live and you will have even less idea.  That dude really can’t sing.  But the glory of listening to White Zombie and Astro-Creep… is that, like the Japanese horror masterpiece Tetsuo: The Iron Man, it’s the fear you feel in your gut when primal drives meet industrial forces that is the meaning, the point of it all.  Rob Zombie’s drawls, mumbles, and screams lie lazily over the top of a frantic clash of industrial guitars, weird and diverse samples, and pounding rhythms.  Astro-Creep manages to feel both like a synthetically produced drug, and as if it crawled out of a dank swamp.  Like Tetsuo..., it is the clash of nature and technology, and everything in between.  It plays with pop culture, subculture, Satanism, sexuality, lunacy, and more, and never makes you doubt that they all belong right there together.  Rob Zombie and Tetsuo director Shinya Tsukamoto both have rollercoaster careers that may make you question their personal quality control standards, but each has a shining moment of industrial horror fetishism that fans will never forget.

“Electric Head, Pt.1 (The Agony)” displays all White Zombie’s influences in its protracted horror movie sample intro, “Perhaps you had better start from the beginning” being lifted from the classic 1957 horror film The Curse of Frankenstein, building atmosphere, suspense, and anticipation of phenomenal headbanging to come.  John Tempesta’s first crisp, snare-heavy drum beat cuts through the industrial sounds at the end of the intro, before giving way to the immense groove of Jay Yuenger’s guitar riff.  Zombie’s movie monster vocals are the deep, growly, nearly indecipherable top layer of what is a non-stop flow of samples, sound effects, and industrial clangings.  The album feels like it was recorded on the set of a horror movie being made in a factory filled with working pistons, grinding gears, and vats of hazardous waste, in to which all the members fell, fused with their instruments, and came out banging their heads to some unrelenting and irresistible industrial beat.  It’s a monster album in every sense of the word.

“Super Charger Heaven” pushes this feeling with turbo-charged riffing and a rhythm section so poppy your headbanging will take on a quality of pogo-like perpetual motion destined to give you brain damage.  Zombie’s vocals are sick, dirty, demon growls, and his cries of “Devilman” will hurl you round the dancefloor like a lunatic.  White Zombie change the pace with the groove-laden “Real Solution #9” inspired by Charles Manson and his attack on the Sharon Tate house.  It’s a darker moment on an album that is generally more concerned with referencing fictional horror than dealing with true life stories of murder.  The impenetrably dense riff of “Creature of the Wheel” continues that darkness with the aural equivalent of trawling a swamp for corpses.  This is where you really notice the down-tuned guitar sound that White Zombie embraced on this record in creating the industrial heaviness missing from previous records.  Even the glory of the chorus, “New God kill machine/And man say Lord of the/Engines – Yeah”, is only temporary relief from this tar pit of a riff. 

“Electric Head, Pt.2 (The Ecstasy)” does away with that, drawing on White Zombie’s love of rock ‘n’ roll to hit you with a soul-pleasing hook.  Introduced with a classic Shaft sample, the song kicks the album back to life with its dancefloor-filling energy.  This song, more than any other, set up Rob Zombie for what he would bring us on Hellbilly Deluxe, and shows off the party-starting power of White Zombie.  “Greasepaint and Monkey Brains”, keeps it simple with quiet, eerily croaked and whispered verses that seem like an inspiration for Alabama 3’s Sopranos theme, “Woke Up This Morning”, and giant choruses led by Zombie’s crazy roars and Yuenger’s expansive riffing.  A plethora of samples leads to the album’s coolest riff on “I, Zombie”: a razor thin slice of guitar that feels like a race car taking a corner at speed, hurtling the listener towards the course wall with little to no protection.  Tempesta’s drumming only serves to throw more momentum in to your imminent demise as the danger mounts in this 3-minute rager.   

But even this song becomes mere prelude to the sexualised, gory, ‘psychoholic’ display of power horror that is “More Human Than Human”.  The solid and nearly unchanging rhythm allows the insane main riff to become the twisted centre of this contorted stream of consciousness.  The riff is a like a series of wails winding up the tension, building pressure in your fragile mind, until it explodes into the heavy chugging of the lunatic’s chorus.  But it’s on "El Phantasmo and the Chicken-Run Blast-O-Rama" that Rob Zombie really lets loose with his most enjoyable vocal performance of the whole album.  His screams of “yeah” are things of pure delight giving life to the laconic ramblings of some demented necromancer.  The rocket-up-its-bum opening of that song is probably one of the pit-starting highlights of an album that will have you dancing, grooving, and snapping your neck continually from start to nearly finish.  ‘Nearly’ because “Blur the Technicolor” and “Blood, Milk, and Sky” close things out with a far looser experimental feel that allows the album to drift off rather than burying a hatchet in your already rattled skull.

Because it is an album that bathes in horror violence drawn from films, real life, and the mad (and maddening) imagination of Rob Zombie, people will either be turned on or off the very moment that The Curse of Frankenstein sample introduces the demon-teasing hour ahead of you.  For me this album changed my view of heavy metal and horror movies in one go.  All of a sudden, the music I liked was party music for stupid dancing and dressing up, rather than the angst-ridden teenage anger of grunge, and the films I watched were inspirationally imaginative and quote-worthy parts of a subculture that seeped in to the mainstream drop by bloody drop.  Heavy metal, after all, is exaggerated in all it does, be it huge sounds or absurd character-based bands, and White Zombie tapped in to that vein of running-with-the-devil madness and fun better than any other band of the 90s MTV generation.  In doing so, they may have created a world in which far less party-worthy bands like Slipknot would emerge, but I’ll leave it up to you to decide on the merits of that legacy.  For me Astro-Creep is the haunted house of modern metal: the fear is the fun, the ghosts, demons, and killers are there for your entertainment, and your pounding heart reminds you that you’re alive.