CD Review: Rob Zombie – Venomous Rat Regeneration Vendor


Rob Zombie – Venomous Rat Regeneration Vendor
Zodiac Swan Records/T-Boy Productions/UMe
All Access Rating: A-

Rob Zombie - Venomous Rat
Regeneration Vendor 2013
Translated from some weird lost language that only Rob Zombie understands, “Ging Gang Gong De Do Gong De Laga Raga” probably has some fiendishly obscene meaning, especially considering that in the pummeling chaos of the track – off his latest album, the awesomely titled Venomous Rat Regeneration Vendor – he’s heard exhorting anyone within earshot to “rally round the girl with the skull on her ass.” Either that or Zombie has suddenly begun speaking in tongues.

Another seething, all-consuming cauldron of mind-bending heavy metal riffage, dizzying dance beats, industrial brutality, electronic unease and Zombie’s demented fantasies all mashed together, Venomous Rat Regeneration Vendor might be his most visceral and entertaining album to date. Amplified by massive, full-throated production values, it’s an aural carnival of cartoonish horror and rip-roaring debauchery, with mean, explosive rock ’n’ roll freak shows like “Behold, the Pretty Filthy Creatures!,” “White Trash Freaks,” “Lucifer Rising”  and “Trade in Your Guns for a Coffin” getting right up in your face and spitting in it. They roar out of the speakers like runaway freight trains. At the controls, Zombie is the mad conductor, but it’s his equally demented assistant, that clever boy John 5, who churns out riff after heady riff, each one more insanely dynamic and unexpectedly potent than the last and seemingly packed with enough dynamite to blow a mile-wide hole in a mountain of rock.

While Venomous Rat Regeneration Vendor is capable of generating awesome power, Zombie and his evil henchmen aren't satisfied with simply throwing their impressive weight around, even though the stomping opener “Teenage Nosferatu Pussy” is one of the heaviest tracks ever committed to a Zombie record. Updating The Doors’ “The Wasp (Texas Radio and the Big Beat)” for the new millennium, the swinging “Dead City Radio and the New Gods of Supertown” – thrown around by swirling organ and crushed under the heel of Five’s grinding guitars – swaggers like a drunken cad, spilling his drink and eyeing up easy girls. And then there’s something insidiously infectious sweeping through “Rock and Roll (in a Black Hole)” like a full-on pandemic, the spare electronic beats giving way to a raging, head-spinning cyclone of raucous metal energy.

Again, Zombie loves to draw the most ludicrously evil images with words, including this little nugget of wisdom from “White Trash Freaks”: “She’s a Warhol painting heading west/I love Ringo across her breast/covering a nasty pitbull scar/life ain’t shit/if you ain’t a star.” And he relishes taking on absurd new identities, like “dirty pig alley Dan” and “King Kong raisin bran” in “Ging Gang Gong De Do Gong De Laga Raga.” A literary Salvador Dali, Zombie’s writings often sound as if they are the product of terrifying acid trips. He does come down to sleepwalk his way through a rather nondescript and tepid reading of Grand Funk Railroad’s “We’re an American Band,” but the rest of Venomous Rat Regeneration Vendor is a delicious descent into madness, a hell ride of crazed, breathtaking intensity and almost manic mood swings. Buy a ticket to the show. You won’t ask for a refund. (universalmusicenterprises.com)
– Peter Lindblad

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