ZODIAC MINDWARP AND THE LOVE REACTION — Tattooed Beat Messiah (review)

ZODIAC MINDWARP AND THE LOVE REACTION — Tattooed Beat Messiah album cover Album · 1988 · Glam Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
2/5 ·
Vim Fuego
You can almost hear the thought processes of this band as this album progresses. It’s all cheers and high fives after pulling off a stunning opening track, but then its red faces and pregnant pauses as they try to follow it up. There simply isn’t enough inspiration or good ideas to fill out a whole album and do it justice.

“Prime Mover” looms large over this album like Godzilla over Tokyo. It’s unstoppable. It is a sleazy 80s rock anthem mixed with a dash of 70s glam, dripping with sexual innuendo and teenage filth. It mixes sing-along vocals with moron-stomp instrumentation and enough schoolboy toilet humour to have your mother “tut-tutting”. It really is a good fun song though. The video for it was directed by Adrian Edmondson, and features an armoured car smashing into a Catholic schoolgirls’ dormitory. The girls are transformed from innocent virgins into strippers and bimbos, and the band blows up first the nuns and then the school. The song was an icon of 80s teen rock.

Once it’s finished though, where does a band go to from there? The rest of the album is fluff and filler.

“Skull Spark Joker” steals the main riff from the Sex Pistols’ “The Great Rock And Roll Swindle”. “Back Seat Education” wishes it were a Kiss song, while “Bad City Girl” is a Motley Crüe reject. “Driving On Holy Gasoline” owes a huge debt to Billy Idol. “Kid’s Stuff” tries for the massive power ballad feel, but its so damn cheesy even White Lion wouldn’t have touched it. The title track in particular is highly uninspiring, as is the dreadful cover of “Born To Be Wild”. It’s a hard song to muck up, but the vocal melody is totally fucked and the band try to be too clever for their own good, proving you shouldn’t mess with a classic.

There are a few highlights though. The slinking, laid back sleaze of “Let’s Break The Law” is delightfully sordid and has a wonderful throbbing bass line. “Planet Girl” is a good old-fashioned dumb rocker. “Untamed Stare” picked up the pace somewhat, sounding like Wolfsbane rocking out.

Singer Zodiac Mindwarp sounds desperately like he wants to be a cross between Marc Bolan and Richard Hell, and perhaps Iggy Pop, but ends up more like Gary Glitter and David Lee Roth shaking hands. The rest of the band sounds like a competent but uninspired bunch of studio musos, fully competent at playing someone else’s music, but short on their own creativity.

The band’s image was all streetwise urban decay and heroin chic, but without the visual side, the whole package comes across as dirtied up, but calculating, glam rock. “Prime Mover” is a classic song of it’s time, and there’s a certain groove to things, but this album would get mugged on a street corner by a bunch of tough six-year-olds.
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