CD Review - Monster Magnet

by Mike Corrigan


Hey, what do ya know? New, heavy music that's actually pretty damn fun. In limited doses anyway. In an age where everything keeps getting safer, cleaner and more "correct" it's almost refreshing to bask in the shameless, visceral pleasures of something like God Says No, the fifth album from New Jersey stoner rockers, Monster Magnet.


Singer Dave Wyndorf -- a Jim Morrison disciple with an Ozzy-esque fascination with the occult (resplendent in laced-up leather, long jet-black hair and neatly trimmed Satanic goatee) -- is most entertaining when he's trying to be his most threatening. His baritone sufficiently propels this baker's dozen of half-baked cock-rock neo classics along the expressway to your skull. Yes kids, it's sex, drugs and rock and roll. In spades. With a little fire and brimstone thrown in for good measure.


Aside from modern production flourishes, God Says No is a thematic and stylistic vestige of rock's gory glory days of excess, a shimmering powertrip of base emotion, paranoia and debauchery.


On "All Shook Out" Wyndorf beckons to the lost generation as he howls "Children of the atom/Let's get together and die." It's a lyric, in fact, that seems to sum up the band's apocalyptic metal-blues shtick perfectly. Monster Magnet may be an anachronism in the brave new world of the 21st century, but their continued success is proof positive that there are still plenty of rockers out there who split with the program a long time ago -- and never looked back.