Review Summary: About as much in common with the original Hellbilly Deluxe as Halloween 3 had to do with Michael Myers
2010’s Hellbilly Deluxe 2 has about as much in common with the first one as Halloween 3 has to do with Michael Myers. It navigates like a course correction from 2006’s Educated Horses on the surface, eschewing the glammed up polish in favor of an in your face attitude. But even with the return of his horror trash aesthetic, the actual music doesn’t have the sort of industrial sleaze that would make something like the pulsating “Sick Bubblegum” into the second coming of “Dragula.”
If anything, this album might be reaching even further back as parts of it play like a more refined version of White Zombie’s primordial garage rock roots. Tracks like “What?” and “Werewolf Women Of The SS” channel Stooges and Alice Cooper with distorted vocal effects, bright guitars, and pounding drums that emphasize the simple but snotty riffs. It goes a little overboard as “Death And Destiny Inside The Dream Factory” comes out muddled but inversely serves the bawdy hooks on “Werewolf, Baby!” quite nicely.
That could make for a solid anchor to work with, but the album’s other songs have a tendency to either come off like unfinished ideas or with a hiccup that brings down their impact. The opening “Jesus Frankenstein” has a killer doom intro but the main body of the song has somewhat awkward start-stops. “Mars Need Women” has a disconnect between its cool spacey acoustic intro and percussive verse-chorus stomps, which the album’s special edition rectified by making the intro into a separate track. “Virgin Witch” and “Cease To Exist” are solid songs that don’t quite catch fire while “Burn” would be a much more effective scorcher had its goofy “Surfin’ Bird” aping chorus been a bridge instead.
“The Man Who Laughs” may provide the strangest instance of this in action. It sets out to be a show-stopping closer, pulling out all the theatrics with orchestral strings that accompany the surging instrumentation and spice up the sweeping choruses. However, the climactic pacing gets disrupted with a swerve into an extended drum solo that doesn’t quite have the live appeal they intended. This is another case where a special edition edit led to a mandolin solo in its place; it’s arguably more effective in comparison but either way just seems to get in the way of the epic’s cinematic momentum.
And with this having been hyped as one of Rob Zombie’s more band-oriented efforts, there’s an unfortunate irony in considering how that might actually work against it in a certain sense. That is not to say the performances are bad; on the contrary, John 5’s guitar work is fantastic as always. It just seems like the musicians might be too ‘professional’ to hit the grime they’re going for, not wanting to get too lofty but also holding back in a certain sense. The vocals make this especially apparent as the shouts don’t quite hit that adrenalized spark of old and the distorted yammering can be a bit much.
Even when one looks past the sequel connection, Hellbilly Deluxe 2 isn’t a bad album so much as one confused about its identity. It has some promising ideas and we do get some great songs out of it, but its execution comes off as noncommittal. One can imagine it coming out stronger with a bit more focus in its songwriting and spontaneity in its playing, but this was where Rob Zombie’s musical apathy became harder to ignore. There’s enough that I like for it to be a decent listen, but there’s also a fair number of caveats.
