Rob Zombie is nothing if not a consummate artist. Musician, filmmaker, writer, performer, painter…there’s little he hasn’t accomplished since forming White Zombie in the mid-80s. He remains explosively creative with the handful of tricks in his bag, and as his new album The Lunar Injection Kool Aid Eclipse Conspiracy, proves, those tricks continue to serve him exceptionally well.
Zombie’s seventh solo record, Lunar Injection, follows the basic formula of its predecessors, with a cascade of metal guitars, growled vocals, eerie synths, and samples from horror and exploitation films. However, it would be a mistake to lump all of those albums under the same sonic tomb, as there’s been a definite progression since Zombie’s solo debut Hellbilly Deluxe, released in 1998.
Continuing where White Zombie left off, Hellbilly Deluxe was a techno-metal blast of high-octane rock n’ roll and haunted house theatrics. Follow-up The Sinister Urge (2001) built on that template, this time augmenting the electronic elements with a full band and more live instrumentation, giving an organic quality to the songs. It also branched out into new territory, namely with tracks such as the cowpoke nightmare “House of 1000 Corpses.” Meanwhile, the underrated, less frenzied Educated Horses (2006) evolved that creepy honky-tonk cabaret aesthetic into a backwoods glam carnival approach.
Hellbilly Deluxe 2 (2010) brought to the table a heavier collection of songs, some of them with a rough, garage rock immediacy lacking in Zombie’s previous offerings. That tactic was expanded on with Venomous Rat Regeneration Vendor (2013), a truly fresh-sounding album that saw the band develop a renewed sense of vigor. Drawing from all of the varying musical styles explored on his prior records, Zombie even touched upon the art-noise, sludge rock, and groove metal of the White Zombie days, an amalgamation of his entire music career compressed into one beast and delivered as down and dirty bursts of horror punk.
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This newfound energy transferred into the next record, The Electric Warlock Acid Witch Satanic Orgy Celebration Dispenser (2016), all but one of the songs less than three minutes long, continuing that sense of punk rock urgency. And now we have the (equally ridiculously titled) new release, which finds Zombie and his cohorts going for broke, throwing everything, including the rusty, blood-stained kitchen sink, into an unhinged mix of wild but accessible psychedelic lunacy.
The Lunar Injection Kool Aid Eclipse Conspiracy opens with an instrumental track buzzing with keyboards and samples before heading into the first proper song, “The Triumph of King Freak.” After a buildup and a brief pause, Zombie’s vocals punch you square in the face with full arena rock intensity as he intones about the titular character (whoever or whatever that may be). That momentum carries over to entries such as “The Ballad of Sleazy Rider,” “The Satanic Rites of Blacula,” and “The Eternal Struggles of the Howling Man,” all examples of fun, straight-up B-movie metal.
Zombie keeps things lively with the highly danceable “Shadow of the Cemetery Man” and glam-boogie stomp of “Shake Your Ass-Smoke Your Grass,” the catchiest song on the album. That track is followed by “Boom-Boom-Boom,” a sexy, slow-tempo number that slithers like The Cramps at their voodoo-iest. (Paired with “Shake Your Ass,” this duo might be the highlight of the record, their diverse sounds, and moods complementing each other).
Additionally, the band is not averse to throwing some curveballs, with “King Freak” oozing into a brief hip-hop/jazz turntable breakdown and “Howling Man” providing a similar lounge funk interlude. The Lunar Injection Kool Aid Eclipse Conspiracy is also outfitted with quite a few instrumental tracks, the majority of them short in length with the exception of “The Much Talked of Metamorphosis,” an acoustic piece that shows off guitarist John 5’s incredible skill as an axman.
But where Zombie and company really break the mold is on “18th Century Cannibals, Excitable Morlocks, and a One-Way Ticket on the Ghost Train,” an utterly bizarre hootenanny that sounds like someone dosed a redneck Tom Waits with acid and dropped him into the middle of a square dance. Comparable to Al Jourgensen’s country side project Buck Satan and the 666 Shooters, the song is so ridiculous as to border on being a joke but anchored by a metal refrain which adds some loud/soft dynamics, not to mention the track’s imaginative, hallucinogenic lyrics. (At one point, Zombie ends a verse with a very confused, “Velvet Jesus is a poster???”). “Ghost Train” has an ancestor on Zombie’s previous album—the white trash alien abduction sex adventure “Well, Everybody’s Fucking in a UFO”—but here the absurdity is taken to new heights
Speaking of lyrics, Zombie preserves his tradition of stream-of-consciousness pop culture smashup nonsense poetry, harkening back to the surreal gibberish of groups like the Birthday Party, one of his biggest influences. This almost certainly will be the only metal release of 2021 that manages to namedrop Evel Knievel, H.P. Lovecraft, Lenny Bruce, and The Flying Nun all within the span of a few songs.
In the final stretch of the album, we hit another memorable arena rock banger, the fast-paced, fist-pumping “Get Loose,” before segueing into a mellow instrumental that wouldn’t feel out of place on a Smashing Pumpkins release. As the record draws to a close with the menacing “Crow Killer Blues,” Zombie chanting “I am the crow killer” in his trademark guttural scream, it’s clear he and his bandmates have quite the artistic achievement on their hands.
The Lunar Injection Kool Aid Eclipse Conspiracy may, in fact, be Zombie’s best album, a colorful and varied collection of songs that showcase both his band (a tight and cohesive outfit) as well as his gifts as a rock artist. Not content to merely rest on his laurels as a tried and true rock star, Rob Zombie continues to pour himself into his work, yet again designing the elaborate album booklet (the back cover is a drawing he made when he was fourteen, an oddly touching personal flourish), and capping off a trilogy of strong records which demonstrate that this endeavor still has a lot of life—or undeath—left in it after all.
