Reviews

CD Review: SPEEDWOLF Ride With Death

COVER-speedwolf

There's this movie: Werewolves on Wheels.  It came out in 1971 and combined one theme that was hugely popular at the time (bikers) with one that really wasn't (lycanthropy).  It played fast and loose with its audience and heartily embraced everything the midnight movie circuit stood for at the time:  exploitative use of sex and violence, broad themes of absurdity bordering on nonsense, an empathetic treatment of counterculture values, etc.

Speedwolf are among those 80's-worshiping bands that could be said to represent the midnight movie analogue to heavy metal: cheese to the fore, shirt tails in the wind, old school in the sense that all legit musical innovations that later bands found worthy of emulating have been stripped away and what you have left is the unapologetic heart of metal, a teenage hedonistic wasteland of thwarted libido and overcompensating machismo… all in the name of freedom and off-the-cuff self-expression.  Not that anyone in a position to offer anything authentic in this vein is capable of the kind of introspection that would characterize it this way.

(more…)