A renaissance man for the modern age, if said renaissance man was covered in gore and gutting a virgin, Rob Zombie has cut quite a swathe through the cultural hinterland as the blood and mud-caked outsider. Who else could lay claim to platinum rock star status as a band leader and solo star as well as once helming the number-one film in the US? Dismiss his bloody theatrics at your peril, Zombie is the real deal, either behind the camera or as the emcee of his ghoulish musical troupe.
I once went to LA to interview Rob Zombie on Halloween, at a show he was co-headlining with Alice Cooper, and we talked about his early years living and studying graphic arts in New York (it would also be where he first hatched his plans to create the White Zombie band). He told me that one of the first things he did when he got to New York was to go and find every landmark from the Taxi Driver movie that was still standing.
Little surprise, then, that when it comes to his music and directorial career - Halloween, House Of 1000 Corpses, The Devil’s Rejects - he often returns to the same sources: the seedy cinematic underworld of 70s cinema, and the darker recesses of the human psyche. Zombie works in the shadows. Little wonder, then, that his latest album, The Great Satan, which occasionally punches like White Zombie at their best, leans heavily on familiar tropes.
A case in point: song titles include Sir Lord Acid Wolfman, The Devilman, The Black Scorpion, while Zombie rails either like a demented ringmaster or some blood-soaked, broken-down Tom Waits-like figure, his husky baritone feeling his way to the end of the song.
As galling as it must have been to lose long-standing guitarist John 5 to Mötley Crüe, it doesn’t seem to have dented his musical ambitions – although I would have liked the occasional nod to his much-overlooked and more reflective Educated Horses period. This is Zombie at full bore: snatches of movie dialogue and trailers mixed with a musical wall of screaming guitars and stabs of distorted synth. Oddly archaic yet thoroughly modern. Which is to say he still sounds pretty timeless, and especially good on the thundering Out Of Sight and the tenacious sounding Black Rat Coffin.
No one does it like Zombie.
