Series – Greatest Hits: Rob Zombie – 20th Century Masters

Full title: 20th Century Masters (The Millenium Collection): The Best Of Rob Zombie

[That’s a mouthful]

So.

I loved White Zombie’s La Sexorcisto, in fact I still have my cassette from back in the day. It was a blast of WTF when music, otherwise, seemed so homogenous.

But I have to be honest, it got very same-y pretty quickly, and right on into his solo stuff. So I was hoping this cheap compilation would be enough for me, eliminating the need to own all the records. Let’s find out if it did!

First up, four tracks from White Zombie:

Thunderkiss ’65 rules. It’s such a dumb song, but that’s its absolute charm, it’s my fave track of his/theirs. Black Sunshine rumbles and has RZ’s drag race commercial voice before hitting metal punk.

More Human Than Human really reminds me of Ministry. Was it an homage? Sounds like it to me. Super-Charger Heaven has a straight-up great riff and it just pounds.

Now we switch to his solo career…

Dragula is like Zombie went to a dance club and ingested Nine Inch Nails. Weird. Superbeast is metal and nu-metal, with great energy but more of the same.

Living Dead Girl was a hit. It plods. Doesn’t grab me at all, pretty boring. Never Gonna Stop (The Red Red Kroovy) is next. Um, what the hell is a Kroovy? Sounds like a Dr. Seuss creation. This is an anomaly, a weak middle-of-the-road dance track, with metal crunch in the chorus. Meh.

House Of 1000 Corpses, man, I strongly disliked those films. You may like them, great for you. This track is bluesy, punctuated by screams. It’s OK, for what it is, but guilty by association. Feel So Numb pretty much describes how I feel, by this point in the disc.

The Devils Rejects: see House Of 1000 Corpses. Repeat. The Lords Of Salem is here too, but I was truly done several tracks ago.

In Sum:

Rob Zombie has a Thing that he does. A sound. It’s OK, if you like metalheads that went to a dance club to be ironic and ended up liking it. But his sound changes so rarely that even a short hits set like this started to lose me, and even the hit songs felt like good song ideas that each go on three extra minutes too long. He shoulda been a punk, kept everything to two minutes long. I’d own all his records, then.