Rob Zombie: Hellbilly Deluxe 2
Artist: Rob Zombie
Album: Hellbilly Deluxe 2
Release Date: 02.02.10
Label: Roadrunner
Producer: Rob Zombie
It was with a marked lack of excitement that I got Rob Zombie’s latest album; I hadn’t even heard about it until he’d said something via Twitter, and even then it took a while to convince myself to get it. I don’t know what made me take the time on the album; maybe a sense of nostalgia for college or some misguided sense of dedication to Rob, who’s brought me a lot of entertainment since the mid-90s. And I don’t know why this one, either, as I’d completely skipped over Educated Horses (which, from what I read, was not a big mistake). The best reason I can come up with is the album’s name. Hellbilly Deluxe was a solid CD, so maybe this one would be as well.
While I am still in the process of re-experiencing Zombie’s solo catalogue, I may have to go out on a limb right away and say this could be his best solo work. The songs are tight, many of them coming in under three minutes, and none seem to drag. “Less is more” is a great business model for Rob, as songs about horror movies and horror movie monsters can become tedious when you have album after album full of them. The great thing is, though, we haven’t come to expect anything more from him. No one picks up a Rob Zombie album looking for blistering social commentary or astounding wordplay; they expect to hear about werewolves and things that lurk in the night, which is exactly what we get. But they key is that we never get too much at once. Even the final song on the album, “The Man Who Laughs,” which comes in at almost nine minutes, doesn’t seem long as it’s divided by an excellent drum solo.
And though Rob delivers only what we’ve come to expect of him over the last 20-odd years, the real backbone of the album is the guitar work of John Lowry. John worked on Educated Horses, but it definitely sounds like he’s been given much more free range to do his own thing this time around, which vastly improves the musical landscape of the album. From the backing riffs to the solos, Lowry shines throughout the entire CD, at points resurrecting classic Southern rock sounds and even Led Zeppelin (the guitar riff on “Werewolf, Baby” sounds a lot like “Custard Pie”). He then mixes these classic sounds with what could almost be described as circus music, creating what you might hear if Molly Hatchet toured with Barnum and Bailey.
My only real complaint on the album—aside from the lackluster lyrics—is the horror movie samples, once again at the beginning of almost every single song. And while I am praising him for finding his niche and sticking to it, a line or two from a different 1950s horror film at the beginning of every song is starting to get redundant. It’s even more annoying when it comes in the middle of a song. The culmination of this is when he plays a sample from Werewolf Women of the SS—a trailer he wrote for the Grindhouse movies. So here we have a song about the Werewolf Women, who he wrote a movie trailer for, sampling lines from the movie trailer he wrote. It would be utterly self-indulgent if the song wasn’t so damned whimsical.
In the end, though, it is what it is. Zombie isn’t blazing any new ground here, though Lowry is trying his damnedest to do so himself. The horror movie lyrics do hold the album back, but the short songs and excellent guitar work help to keep anything from feeling too tedious. I doubt this album will come anywhere near my overall top 10 for the year, but taken for what it is—pure entertainment—I will give it eight out of 10 resurrected corpses.
