Album Review: Monster Magnet - “A Better Dystopia”

 

Still very much out there and kicking, Monster Magnet's most recent album, 2018's Mindfucker, was a much welcomed return to form from Dave Wyndorf and his stoner rock veterans. Now in 2021 we get the prospect of a Monster Magnet covers album and I'm not quite sure what to expect here. Certainly, it's fair to say that there's literally only two tracks on here I'm even vaguely familiar with in the form of Hawkwind's psychedelic rave-up Born To Go and the Pretty Things' sinister spaced-out Death. Wyndorf and co definitely do a credible job on these, keeping the spirit of the originals intact and adding the unmistakable Monster Magnet stamp to 'em.

The rest of the songs I'm not familiar with from their original forms so you're going to have to excuse my ignorance here but highlights include the lurching riff of Solid Gold Hell (originally by the Scientists), the belligerent Mr Destroyer (originally by Poobah), the pure Stooges style chaos of Motorcycle (Straight To Hell) (originally by the Table Scraps) and the Cavemen's It's Trash (not the UK based garage rockers, a '70s psych band with the same name). Okay so there's a couple of songs on here that kind of meander a bit as well such as the group's take on Pentagram's Be Forewarned but that tends to be an occupational hazard with Monster Magnet albums in general really.

A Better Dystopia definitely strikes me as a bit of a niche album which is more for fans of the band and psychedelic die-hards than those with just a casual interest. But if you fancy a glimpse into the weird and wonderful mind of Dave Wyndorf then it definitely won't disappoint you.

Bandcamp Link

NITE SONGS RATING: 🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌑🌑🌑 (7/10)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Garbage Days Revisited #74: Silverfish - "Organ Fan" (1992)

Image
  "You can't kill what you're afraid of...are you afraid of me?"  - Silverfish  - Big Bad Baby Pig Squeal I guess the obvious place to have written something on Silverfish would have been in one of the very early Sounds From The Junkshop but I'm ashamed to admit that they were a band who, while I was sort of aware of their presence at the time, I wouldn't really properly discover until well after they'd split.  I can remember the band name from the occasions they'd pop up on the Indie Top 10 on the ITV Chart Show but it was only when their singer Lesley Rankine cropped up as a guest vocalist on Therapy? 's Troublegum album (on Lunacy Booth  and Femtex ) that I decided to try and investigate their output in a bit more detail. Only to find they'd literally split up a few months before. Bugger. Silverfish hailed from Camden in the pre-Britpop days back when it was still the grimy scuzzy end of North London and the sort of place tourists would act
Read more

Garbage Days Revisited #29: The Quireboys - "Homewreckers And Heartbreakers" (2008)

Image
  "I played my hand in a rock 'n' roll band, it was my ace, my jack and my king/I rolled the dice to see what Lady Luck would bring, salvation or sin..."  - The Quireboys  - One For The Road In a way, I'm quite surprised I haven't covered the Quireboys either on Sounds From The Junkshop or here on Garbage Days Revisited yet. Unlike a lot of bands who were slung in with the "hair metal" tag in the late '80s and early '90s, I actually was  aware of the band when they had their brief flirtation with chart success around the turn of that decade and had a couple of their singles in my collection - Hey You  on a Now compilation (which sounds incredibly incongruous all these years later!) and There She Goes Again/Misled  on cassette single. For whatever reason though, they never quite became the firm favourites of mine that their fellow Soho dwelling glam rockers the Dogs D'Amour did. I'm not quite sure why - I think I just thought the Dogs
Read more

Garbage Days Revisited #90: Soho Roses - "The Third And Final Insult" (1989)

Image
  "If you won't love me then I'll find someone who will!"  - Soho Roses  - So Alone The Soho Roses were a classic case of right band, wrong time. If they'd broken on to the scene in the last few years then they'd have had a ready made audience on the 21st century power pop scene and probably be regulars at Some Weird Sin and similar club nights in the Smoke. The reality? They broke through towards the tail end of the '80s and got lumped in with the dying embers of the Soho glam scene, leaving behind one sadly underappreciated album and a few EP's before self-combusting. In a way, I sort of see the Roses as a British version of Enuff Z'Nuff. Not so much in terms of their sound but more of the fact that they were a group crowbarred in with glam who weren't really a natural fit there and kind of paid the price for it - I've always thought Enuff Z'Nuff sounded more like a Britpop band with flashbomb guitars than a hair metal band. Oh sure,
Read more