i hate the sound of guitars

Cultösaurus Erectus is the BÖC album that everyone likes better than I do. Conventional wisdom calls it a rebound from the disastrous Mirrors. but I think it’s actually a worse record (although perhaps not quite as dated production-wise). The band sounds unsure of its own identity. Presumably they were feeling pressured to repeat the success […]

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Mirrors is my pick for most-underrated BÖC album. It has a terrible rep, which I think is partly because it opens with “Dr. Music,” one of the worst tracks ever committed to tape by the classic lineup. (Discuss: are the harmonica squeals the kiss of death, or the synth-toms, or the faux-soul backing vocals, or […]

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Fair warning: Imaginos not only has a storyline, it has snippets of dialogue interwoven into some of the songs. Every track is at least 5 minutes long. “Overblown” doesn’t do justice to the arrangements; there are several guest lead vocalists, and for a band with such serious guitar chops, there’s a befuddling proliferation of stunt […]

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And now for something else completely different, taking up the gauntlet thrown by my pals Jestaplero and Flasshe, a subjective evaluation of the relative merits of a non-comprehensive selection of Blue Öyster Cult records, starting with the one that’s probably at the bottom of my pile, 1998’s Heaven Forbid.
Novelist John Shirley titled his […]

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