The thanks go out again to Vickie for taping this for me. Well, I can’t afford to buy everything. And although the last proper White Zombie album was good, it wasn’t enough to turn me into a maniacal zombiehead. So the lure of a new album wasn’t enough, though I’ll be checking out the gig, cos WZ live were to be honest, a major disappointment to me.

So what do you really expect from the side project of someone who always gave the impression of being the leader, and creative inspiration behind a band. That’s right, you expect similar to what his full time band would provide. And you wouldn’t be far wrong if the truth be told.

There’s been a fair amount of talk, or so it seemed that this would see a more industrially technoy style ie, more of those blips and bleeps thrown in for good measure. And well, that’s I guess true. But it doesn’t dominate things.

At the end of the day, I only ever bothered owning one WZ album. Wonder what that one might be? And the problem was that for every cracker on it, there was a bit of a duffer. And there’s an element of that on here as well. Though maybe not so pronounced. Here you have the excellence of Dragula, which to these ears might just be the best thing he’s done. But it’s mixed then with the middle section of the album. Which passes by. Not slowly, which is often the indication of tedium, but whatever, it still just passes me by. That’s not to say it’s bad, the likes of Living Dead Girl and Meet The Creeper are primetime Zombie cuts. But sometimes it sags a bit.

The other problem with Zombie, and it might not be a problem, was that I often got a sense of limited ideas hiding behind grandiose presentation. Not that there’s anything wrong with that (I’ve gotten away with it for 9 issues), but, if you’re not entirely in line with those ideas, that line of thought, then it wears thin. I mean, 13 songs of cadaverous cavorting inside the spookshow international. Course it sounds great, as did, AstroCreep2000andtherestoftheverylongtitlethatnoone everrepeatedafterthefirsttimecosgoodasitwasit wasjustpadding. Anyway, this time he pushes his boundaries with some of his best Manson impressions. Or maybe Manson does impersonations of Zombie. Really, they’re not that distant in where they’re coming from, just that Zombie seems to more readily admit that he’s a cartoon figure than Manson does these days. Anyway, What’s On Channel X and Return of the Phantom Stranger both bear the hallmarks, despite actually being pretty good songs.

Still, it’s going to be an amazing few gigs right? Cos he’s telling us it will be, so it must be true. We’ll see.