:: Billy Idol Devil's Playground -- Rob Zombie Educated Horses ::

By Savaiz Bukhari

An aging rocker is still a rocker nonetheless. His voice may have lost its natural hoarseness but viva la ‘vocal fx’ he still sounds fresher then ever. Billy was a major rock star before I was even born and he still very much is, only now he’s the ‘living legend’. His latest album is called Devil’s Playground and here’s how it goes.

The album ‘erupts’ all over with the explosive Super Overdrive while Billy screams:

We’re in the devil’s playground within I don’t mind,

Straight up ready to go and I’m so tired.

Does he still have the magic? Yes, He Does!

He’ll be famous just because, just because—

Round & round & round we go one time before we die.

Round & round & round the world in super overdrive.

See it through the little hole, see it. Bye, bye!

Here I’m, I’m in super overdrive

Simple and self-explaining, isn’t it? Next up is the World Coming Down. It’s about the daily grind and the pressure society exerts on each of its members. It doesn’t stop there but the same theme continues into the next track called Rat Race where Billy laments the fact that it is hard to lead a simple life with one’s ‘own’ family instead of becoming a part of the ever-consuming rat race. The song, glum and gloomy in its composition, very accurately describes the entire 9-to-5 process in all its ‘grim & grisly’ details. Sherri is about the catharsis of the earlier tracks as it encourages one to ‘run away’ from the everyday mundane world into an alternate reality. The next number named Plastic Jesus is about symbolism and the power of belief through the elaborate example of the plastic Jesus statue used as a dashboard ornament. However true to his punk nature Billy makes some pinching remarks about how society may have misinterpreted religion to suit their ‘individual’ needs and lack of true understanding about Christianity among Christians themselves.

Scream helps pick up the tempo which had come ‘down’ during the space of the last couple of songs and makes some explicit comments about acts of sexual nature. Trust Billy to turn a song titled scream into a ‘passion song’ Punk-Style. Yellin’ At The Christmas Tree is a ‘pseudo carol’ about the troubles of a family with the drunkard ‘man of the house’. After the passable Romeo’s Waiting comes the dark paranormal number Body Snatcher which is ‘Classic Idol’ and is both creepy and enjoyable. This song is just screaming to be picked for a horror-thriller’s sound track. The mood stays dark as Evil Eye with another classic ‘melodious’ hard-rocking track that actually takes one back into the heyday of the hard-rock/grunge music but the added pleasant surprise are the keyboard effects turning the song around a near full circle to sound as a Nu-metal track ‘in parts’. The near country/blues like Lady Do Or Die is again passable and is followed by an equally slow-tempo and ‘state-your-love-explicitly’ track Cherie which is equally passable for ‘long time’ Billy Idol fans though new fans may be won by him in parts of Tennessee, Mississippi & ‘other states with pairs of alphabet in their names’. The finale, Summer Running is inexplicably a ‘middle of the road’ number which can be neither categorized as a ‘bad’ song nor a ‘good’ one. Thus if you take out the last three tracks, the rest of the album is ‘excellent’ and that’s more than enough for any fan of Billy Idol.

Rob Zombie is famous for his love of horror movies, gruff singing voice and horror/fear inspiring synthesizer-metal. All of the above items feature in the new album, Educated Horses created by the band he heads/controls and egoistically calls Rob Zombie (after him, who else?J).

The album starts off with the instrumental opener Sawdust in the Blood which is a brooding track with sampled horror-film narration as vocals. Next up is the perennial Rob-Zombie favorite horror-metal style number American Witch. The song maybe a celebration of the entity known as the ‘American Witch’ (a pun on the American Werewolf character??) or it may have a deeper connotation being used as a symbolic representation of or of someone in the US Political System. Foxy Foxy has a more ‘mainstream’ 70s rock guitaring style and can be considered the ‘title-track’ for its Educated Horses lyrics. You get slapped in here u get saved/he who brutalizes the timeless stage/he is the mongrel he wants its all/he lives for relics hung on the wall/don’t u want to ride it/the educated horses/foxy foxy who’s it gonna be/foxy foxy… ‘sings’ Rob’s gruff in tune throat. The following track is the middle-eastern music inspired 17 Year Locust. The song points out the ‘key features’ of the US Government’s direct intervention policy in the Middle East since the 1990 Gulf War and blames it for the present state of affairs of the World. The Scorpion Sleeps is about the fear within about the ‘dangers from within’ which have been put on the ‘back burner’ in pursuance of the ‘enemy at large’.

The ‘middle o the album’ instrumental 100 Ways hints with its ‘brooding silence’ at all the alternatives available that remain un-reviewed/rejected. The horrifyingly titled Let it all Bleed Out begins with the shocking recollection of the singer ‘One time I saw a Filipino cab-driver cut out her cancer with a pristine butter knife.’ The ‘seriously’ head-banging song calls for ‘let it all bleed out now’ in an attempt to purge the ‘body’ of all poison (a primitive solution —- don’t you think?). The slow-tempo track Death of it All is weirdly a ‘soothing’ (as soothing Rob Zombie can be) track about a topic as scary as death. Somber as death, rest in peace being the end-goal. Its catharsis is the next track Ride about life which indeed is a roller-coaster journey much like the shifting-tempo of the song accounting for mood swings and times good & bad. The penultimate song The Devil’s Rejects is a pseudo-country hard-rock track about people so vile they get rejected by even the devil and left to cause havoc among the ‘normal’ residents of the world. The nursery-rhyme tune is also a feature unique to M/s. Rob Zombie. The album culminates with the possibly ‘recorded live’ The Lords of Salem which features guest vocals in addition to the band’s own. The song asks the logical question after the witch hunt at Salem who ended up in control, the ‘so-called witches’ or the even viler ‘Lords of Salem’.