Of course, that brings with it the usual features that’ll contribute to the baseline of quality, most prominently Zombie himself with his hoary, shredded rasp that has a lot of inherent appeal, but for a fairly weighty album in terms of track presence, the only places where it really sticks out are in the vastly different stylistic shifts. It’s certainly less slapdash than its predecessor, but in a way that does take away some of the character overall even as a more competently created album, it isn’t much more than another Rob Zombie album. What is more in that vein is the fact that The Lunar Injection… can suffer when there isn’t much beneficial done with that sameness. This is very much in his wheelhouse and by that standard he’s holding steady, but that’s not something to hold against this album either. It does need to be stressed that there’s few outright great songs here, or at least not to the standard of previous Zombie cuts like Dragula or Never Gonna Stop, but going about repurposing the ideas of those songs works about as well as it has for the past however many years he’s been doing it. Depth might as well be a foreign concept, but that’s clearly engineered to be the case, as the likes of The Ballad Of Sleazy Rider and Boom-Boom-Boom find a lot more mileage in what they can do with the image and aesthetic. That’s far from a sound judgement, but it’s apt for the sort of slime-coated, cartoonish slurry that Rob will come out with, big on schlock if not on substance. Longevity still winds up on the chopping block for it, but as the last album tried to establish and The Lunar Injection Kool Aid Eclipse Conspiracy tries to reinforce, there can be a bit of worth to that in the brazen moment. But conversely, that can also be why albums like this tend to work, where the disregard for conventional structure or composition is more peripheral above anything else to foster that over-the-top, B-movie style. There’s already a shelf life to this sort of industrial alt-metal, and that album felt more or less like drawing attention to that in a very obvious way. It can’t be avoided that 2016’s The Electric Warlock Acid Witch Satanic Orgy Celebration Dispenser felt like a direction being drilled into way too far, where the splatterpaint horror style that might embody Zombie’s films was being translated to his music, resulting in an album that, especially with hindsight, felt undercooked, rushed and supremely forgettable. There’s definitely good material within it, but even on the most superficial level, his work isn’t something that inspires much considerable of longevity, particularly on his later works. If anything it’s the complete opposite, where his particular shock-rock image has such deliberate schlock and grindhouse sensibilities that it’s a wonder he’s been able to stretch it over a two-decade-plus solo career, and that’s just outside of White Zombie. It’s frankly amazing that Rob Zombie has lasted as long as he has, and it’s not due to any sort of controversy. The Lunar Injection Kool Aid Eclipse Conspiracy
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