Best Blue Öyster Cult Album

ok club ninja is not as good as i remember haha

but dancing in the ruins is still classic!

perfect water's end guitar solo is stunning

make rock not war might be the worst BOC song? gotta be close

the title alone is eliciting irl lols over here

Oh yeah I meant to say that the other keeper off Revolution By Night is "Veins".

yeah veins is great!

Jon lewis otm about the Sun Jester/In Thee/Mirrors run; makes Dr. Music more palatable imo.

I saw the Moorcock paperback that The Great Sun Jester is based on for sale from a sidewalk vendor but I didn't buy it :(

Is it called the Great Sun Jester? I might try to check iit out when I read thru the Jerry Cornelius quartet

It should be noted that the Jerry Cornelius stuff is pretty… different than the rest of Moorcock's oeuvre.

It's called The Fire Clown.

Side 2 of Mirrors is not without its merits...Allen Lanier's vampy "Lonely Teardrops" could have been a Doc Pomus cover, the Cars/Who power pop of "You're Not The One (I Was Looking For)" is marred only by a weak chorus (then again, in a power pop song a weak chorus is a double-technical), and the sheer [doom metal-to-free jazz-and back again] daftness of "The Vigil" certainly portends later stuff like "Monsters"...about the only track on Mirrors I could never really get behind in some way is "I Am The Storm"...

getting back to this after a quick couple listens...

so i guess "the great sun jester" applies to the jerry cornelius novels in the same way that "black blade" applies to elric? huh. dinna know. anyway, it's a decent tune, but the lyrics are atrocious. can't abide it:

they have killed the wild-eyed jester
they have killed the fire clown
he'll never sing his songs again
he'll never dance between the stars again
he'll never laugh again
no, he'll never ever laugh again

ffs. "dr. music" is much more endurably, cheerfully cheezy, imo:

so if you really wanna do it
you better do it ... hot

lol. now that's a fucking philosophy. plus the build-up and chorus remind me in good ways of both kiss and def leppard, and i can def hang w that. "in thee" is great too, lost in the 70s, passed out behind mirrorshades in 1st class, though i can't help r'ing my de at that trop-cult "thee". would sound so much better if it was just plain old "you".

strongly disagree w the idea that side 1 has any run of good songs. it's totally up and down. "sun jester" blows, "mirror" blows, "moon crazy" us beautiful and winds things up nicely. honestly, i like side two about equally well. "the vigil", dopey as it may be, has a tough riff and a sweetly aching chorus. plus that spooky "come to us" over the badass solo, in case you forgot who you're listening to. "you're not the one" starts off like t-rex, but moves into this weird, chilled-out new wave number. not great, but i dig the chorus. "lonely teardrops" rips off styx but i love it anyway. anticipates the downtempo but off-kilter vibe of "deadline".

Don't think The Great Sun Jester applies to Jerry Cornelius. I think George is just reading those books.

Yeah the book its based off of is The Fire Clown. Sorry for the confusion!

Also <3 sun jester and mirrors, tho the lyrics of SJ are def hard to take seriously. imo you need a sense of humor to fully appreciate this album.

well yeah, but that's a fire clown too far, imo

Listening to Heaven Forbid now.

not loving this...the production seems like a weird attempt to make them palatable to 90s metal audiences...pretty crunchy guitar tones

"Harvest Moon" is a nice little oddity! weird little tale of losing the family farm, sharing a title with a Neil Young album/song

lol this revive has made me listen to so much Blue Oyster Cult in the last couple of days

btw the alternate album art to heaven forbid is something too!

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/f/ff/BOC_heaven_forbid_alternative.jpg/220px-BOC_heaven_forbid_alternative.jpg

Never listened to Cultosaurus before. Holy shit I love it.
Hungry Boys, Lips in the Hills, Black Blade...shit is so good

yeah it's great

btw...Blue Oyster Cult's 2012 trek is the weirdest tour itinerary I have ever seen in my life:

http://www.blueoystercult.com/Road-main.html

featuring both North Dakota and Brazil

From Coconut Creek FL to Sao Paulo Brazil

kinda psyched to hear "Still Burnin'" which i'm assuming is the cheesy Unforgiven II to "Burnin' For You"

"Live For Me" is real nice actually

I can't remember... does Heaven Forbid or Curse of the... have that "Damaged But I like It" song? That's a contender for all-time least bearable BOC...

But between Heaven.. and Curse... you can put together a nice 10 track Blue Oldster Cult album.

haha yeah that "damaged" song is on Heaven Forbid, really bad

listened to these back to back and Curse is hands-down the better album

OK so BOC are playing a fucking ostrich festival...http://www.ostrichfestival.com/

I still can't get into side 2 of Agents Of Fortune, Spectres is a far better album I reckon. But then every album after Secret Treaties contains a fair amount of suck.

Secret Treaties -> Tyranny -> debut -> Stalk Forrest Group album -> Spectres -> Agents -> Fire Of Unknown Origin -> Cultosaurus -> Mirrors -> Revolution -> Imaginos -> Club Ninja -> still haven't heard the 2 later ones

Working on my mega mix for spotify, hard not to put every song from tyranny and secret treaties on

Secret Treaties > On Your Feet... > Tyranny > Fire Of Unknown Origins > Cultosaurus > Spectres > Agents > Stalk Forrest > Debut > Mirrors > Curse...Hidden Mirror > Imaginos > Heaven Forbid/Revolution by Night > (afraid to listen to Club Ninja)

With everything after the debut counting as a 'overall bad album with x number of great tracks on it'

And On Your Feet... counts as a proper album just because it's so fucking great.

i hadn't really listened to the last three 80s albums in quite a while, so i spent some time with the revolution by night, club ninja and imaginos yesterday. turns out that i enjoy quite a few tracks off the former two, not just the pop singles. they're probably terrible albums by any sane measure, but i've become such a huge BOC fan over the last couple years that just sounding a little cultish is good enough for me. though the band had apparently fragmented and several club ninja tracks were written by others, these albums aren't much worse than mirrors. i sincerely hate imaginos though. i never wanted BOC to be a "real metal band", and the new songs are all so long, ponderous and hook-free. they even ruin "astronomy" and "blue oyster cult", a terrible crime.

THE REVOLUTION BY NIGHT

1) Take Me Away

huge def lep rip on the chorus, strong echoes of “photograph”, but the central riff is awesome (“spidery” as I like to say). starship is an obvious parallel, but BOC retain more of their essential identity amidst the 80s cheese. and the solo slays, of course.

2) Eyes On Fire

more fire clown garbage. no one deserves this.

3) Shooting Shark

one of the best late cult jams. love the smoothly rolling bass throughout, banks of warning synths, and that sax, man, cuts like a knife. haunting lyrics despite the bonehead title phrase, and i love the tradeoff between sax and gtr in the last minute.

4) Veins

um, okay, meltzer's lyrics are cool & creepy, troo cult style. plus that cryptacized who riff on the chorus, awesome, but this song's a mess. the parts don't hang together and that supershitty synth is way too prominent. gtr shredding and constant textural shifts as a substitute for coherent songwriting. near miss.

5) Shadow of California

new wave by way of joe walsh? verse is dull, but the tones are cool, hanging piano notes, talkbox guitar effects. huge chorus that's suitably anthemic but not terribly memorable. half like this.

6) Feel the Thunder

shitty biker rock. okay, “three friends”, i geddit. haw.

7) Let Go

so embarrassing. should have saved that "B.O.C." chant for something worth singing along with.

8) Dragon Lady

well, ok, it's a song about a “dragon lady” so it's obviously fucked, but given the basic stupidity of the proposition, it's a lot of fun. dig the “reaper” cop at the end.

9) Light Years of Love

hideous

CLUB NINJA

1) White Flag

generic 80s hard rock with slick production, big drums, catchy guitar bits. piles of synths, but used more for atmosphere and texture than as a focus. inane but rocks okay and does deliver a bit of that doomy, sepulchral feel.

2) Dancing In the Ruins

big pop move, but more blandly optimistic than “burning for you”. “it's all done with mirrors, have no fear,” lol (even though someone else wrote it). like so many of their shittiest mid-80s songs, the sound here recalls stuff like starship, asia and survivor, but it's a good deal better than most of their other attempts in this direction.

3) Rock Not War

an abortion

4) Perfect Water

even worse, a worse abortion. soulful and darkly sweet where "rock not war" tries to get tough, but just as earnestly shitty. “do you know jaques cousteau?”

5) Spy In the House of the Night

three in a row. crappy heavy rock cheese with some nice organ work and a cool, crepuscular groove. a worthless song, but it builds well and ends on a pretty impressive high.

6) Beat 'em Up

moronic “hard rock” in an unmistakably 80s mode. judas priest softened by def leppard. awesome harmony lick on the chorus, and the solo slays. utterly generic and sounds nothing like BOC, but i kind of dig it.

7) When the War Comes

“energy imprisoned will make itself free. booga-chacka, booga-chacka.” fuck yeah. the obvious cult epic on this album. so self-referential, boys. “creator, destroyer, victory, defeat. i did not come to bring a seed. black flag, red flag, space and time. the future is my mind.” woah. basically an extended, spidery drone in the vein of "blue oyster cult", but that's a good look for the band, imo.

8) Shadow Warrior

bunk. tries to be all ozzy-style paranoid and doomy, but just sucks. draggy and uninspired until it goes all ape crazy with the guitars towards the end. like a lot of bad late cult songs, the attempt to rescue great riffs and shitty songwriting with a “mind-blowing” rave-up. and my mind is blown, no argument, but I could use a song to wash the residue down.

9) Madness to the Method

a response to lords of the new church? I dunno, but that piano says yes, and I endorse the consonance, intentional or not. one of my favorite 80s BOC tunes, cringeworthy lyrics and all. pyrotechnic gtr excess, fuck yes, this time in service to a decent song. “wenches in the trenches on a saturday night.”

secret treaties > tyranny & mutation > blue oyster cult > fire of unknown origin > cultosaurus erectus > stalk forrest group > agents of fortune > spectres > mirrors > club ninja > revolution by night > imaginos > still haven't heard the last two

i used to think of "club ninja" a place, like a club called ninja, maybe the space station on the album cover. now i like to imagine that it's a club-oriented ninja. he likes dancing. much better that way.

1) I can't find many good interviews w/BOC on the internet

2)..um....this:

I've got more questions from the fan club. In the 1973 song "Seven Screaming Dizbusters," what is a dizbuster?

Bloom: (laughs) Well, it has a sexual connotation.

That's OK, I'm a grownup. You can tell me.

Bloom: I think Richard Meltzer and Sandy Pearlman came up with a term, that was sort of like an inside joke to them, and used it in the lyric of that song. To them, the diz was the groove at the top of the penis.

Yeah?

Bloom: And that's what a diz was. So "Seven Screaming Dizbusters" are some pretty bad boys.

So they were fucking so hard, the tip of their penis fell apart.

Bloom: I can't read more into it, and you're probably reading more into it than I can. But that's really what the diz is, in our nomenclature.

I always thought dizbuster was some satanic jive.

Revolution by Night tour -- my first ever concert -- Saginaw Civic Center -- with Dokken and Aldo Nova!

basically an extended, spidery drone in the vein of "blue oyster cult", but that's a good look for the band, imo.

wtf, me? meant "subhuman". retitling on imaginos throwing me off.

sometimes i feel like i've heard it too many times

but right now i'm sort of in awe of "Don't Fear the Reaper"

It still works for me, like '8 Miles High' or 'Maneater'.

Contendo, thankig u profusely for liveblogging those two albums. Weird that I forgot about 'Take Me Away' off Revolution. That was the radio hit! It, 'Veins' and 'Shooting Shark' are the ones I keep in my library.

Does anyone here have Martin Popoff's BOC book? It's the only such thing in existence afaik. I need to try to hunt it down...

the songwriting's really nothing to write home about on Curse of the Hidden Mirror but the guitar tone/recording is frankly beautiful

didn't know Jim Carroll wrote the lyrics for "Perfect Water" off Club Ninja! they had the weirdest cast of characters writing lyrics for them: Meltzer, Patti Smith, Michael Moorcock, Jim Carroll, etc...also recently some "cyberpunk author" I hadn't heard of (wrote for Curse and Heaven Forbid)

Aero - there are some gems on Curse I think! esp Pocket and Live for Me

dang, ums. just read carroll's "perfect water" lyrics, and they're a hell of a lot better than i thought they were when i was trying to sort them out on my own. guess i'll have to give that one another try, because it was really only the lyrics that were bugging me (i was hearing them as some kind of overly concerned eco-plea).

oh ok jeez i guess the "cyberpunk" author i mentioned is named John Shirley and is pretty well regarded (most famous for writing The Crow but I guess a big influence on William Gibson?)

Shirley's cyberpunk novels are City Come A-Walkin and the A Song Called Youth trilogy. Avant-slipstream critic Larry McCaffery called him "a postmodern Edgar Allen Poe."[2] Bruce Sterling has cited Shirley's early story collection Heatseeker as being a seminal cyberpunk work in itself. Several stories in Heatseeker were particularly seminal, including Sleepwalkers, which, in just one example, probably provided the inspiration for William Gibson's "meat puppets" in Neuromancer. Gibson acknowledged Shirley's influence in an introduction to Shirley's City Come A-Walkin. Shirley's story collection, made up of increasingly bizarre stories, the whimsically titled Really, Really, Really, Really Weird Stories has developed a cult status.

William Gibson, the author of Neuromancer, collaborated with Shirley on short stories—as did fellow cyberpunks Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker. Shirley's lyricism, wealth of ideas and imagination, crossover pioneering, and street-level honesty have been praised by other writers including Clive Barker, Peter Straub, Roger Zelazny, Marc Laidlaw, and A. A. Attanasio. His more surreal work, as in A Splendid Chaos showed how it was possible to describe the indescribable with a paradoxical believability and impeccable internal logic no matter how bizarre the subject matter. Shirley's personal experiences as a recovering drug addict and punk rocker brought real verisimilitude to his darker, urban-tinctured writing.

okay, song's half-decent now that i've gotten over my objection to my misinterpretation of lyrics. not great, long and rather 80s AOR bland, but it's clearly BOC, both in theme and sound. club ninja consists of five proper BOC tunes propped up with four oddball outliers by outside songwriters (counting "perfect water" as one of the propers cuz roeser wrote the music and jim's clearly working in the mythos). sad part is the ringers are generally more musically memorable.

"urban tinctured"

shirley's first novel, from '79, is called transmaniacon. never read it, but full circle lol. remember digging his short stories in mags like F&SF and IASFM during the early-mid 80s.

While I'm thinking about it, all BOC addicts should check out DENIAL OF DEATH by Brain Surgeons (Albert Bouchard, his wife at the time, and the lead guitarist from the Dictators). Came out in 2007 or so. It scratches some of that early 80s subversive MOR BOC itch.

cool will investigate?

jon do you know Buck's solo album from 82? allmusic review is pretty negative, but it's a pretty old review and not super informative

No I've never heard it. I'd like to. His BOC songs are pretty ace on Fire Of Unknown Origin.

turns out the Buck album in on spotify...so far...eh...nothing amazing, very AOR/MOR Aldo Nova type style, Mirrors would be the closest equivalent in BOC terms, but yeah the first song is really corny, so far 2nd one is only marginally better

hey guys

i finished my BOC Spotify Playlist last night!

The Playlist of 1,000 Psychic Wars:

http://open.spotify.com/user/matthelgeson/playlist/46Ccxmnl1IErLlsdE0C3hM

just FYI, Imaginos isn't on Spotify so no tracks off that, but every other album