“Black Blade” is to my mind the least successful of the band’s three collaborations with author Michael Moorcock. I like the tongue-in-cheek presentation of Moorcock’s infamously melancholy protagonist, Elric (”I just wanna be a lover/not a red-eyed screaming ghoul”), but I can’t overlook the song’s lack of a chorus (”black” in one speaker and “blade, blade, blade” echoing away in the other does not a proper chorus make), or its lapses into the ridiculous (the “grow, grow, groooowww!” break; the song’s concluding section, with the vocoder voice of Elric’s evil sword boasting over a “Baba O’Riley”-ish keyboard bed).

“Monsters” is the track most emblematic of Cultösaurus Erectus’s identity crisis. With a lounge-jazz sax solo, a near-rip of King Crimson’s “21st Century Schizoid Man,” and a section that sounds, well, kinda like Blue Öyster Cult, it’s got a few too many ideas for one song.

Most of the other tracks don’t gel for me in one way or another — “Divine Wind” is too straight a blues number; the instrument tones don’t blend pleasingly in “Deadline”; and “Hungry Boys” is tinny just where I think it needs to crunch. The nadir is “The Marshall Plan,” about which the less said the better.

Happily, the album improves dramatically at the end. Thanks in part to a rare, not-unDaltrey-esque lead vocal turn from one of the Bouchard brothers (I’m guessing), “Fallen Angel” sounds more than a bit like a late ’70s tune from The Who. “Lips in the Hills” has an almost punky energy level. As an adult, “Unknown Tongue”’s soft-core account of adolescent S&M-tinged sexual self-exploration/demonic ritual seems distinctly creepy, but I still remember the potent kick it gave me in my own adolescence, and the chorus harmonies are still sublime.

Star rating: 1.78