Technically speaking this is a collaboration between Meat Loaf (Marvin Lee Aday) and Jim Steinman – Steinman writing the operatic songs and Meat Loaf being the perfect voice to bring them to life. If you were asked to name a Meat Loaf song that isn’t Bat Out Of Hell, there’s a good chance it’ll also be on this album; it’s one of those kinds of albums.
Steinman’s songs are like if Queen did a cover of a Springsteen track, or maybe if Phil Spector produced a Springsteen track. This perception is probably enhanced by Roy Bittan of the E-Street band doing the piano on most of the tracks on the album, so that same kind of epic soundtrack feel that comes with Born To Run is also present here. The songs are big and bombastic. Visually all Steinman songs (be they with Meat Loaf or Bonny Tyler, or whoever) usually involve videos featuring lots of candles, floaty curtains, and big hair (terrible fire risk).
This album takes a lot of the Fifties teen song topics and makes them huge and operatic, going far enough over the top that they go through being daft and become good again, and to my mind I think that matches the exaggerated emotions of teenage love brilliantly – everything is the absolute best, the absolute worst, all emotions will last forever and consume everything.
A crash song like The Shangri-La's Leader Of The Pack is turned into the 7-minute epic of Bat Out Of Hell, full of images of hot summer nights and supernatural happenings. The radio edit misses out the overture at the start, and the crash section itself, ending with the narrator riding off to avoid commitment, but the full version is much better.
Paradise By The Dashboard light takes something like Chuck Berry’s No Particular Place To Go, a track about teens using the car as a place for amorous exploration, and turns it into an 8-minute monster duet between Meat Loaf and Ellen Foley that abruptly changes tempo, has a humourous baseball commentary for passing through the bases before Foley’s character stops proceedings and demands to know “will you love me forever”. Hint for life, don’t be like Meat Loaf’s character and prevaricate “let me sleep on it”.
There are some sensitive ballads, notably Heaven Can Wait, and various other musings on teenage horniness mixed – All Revved Up With No Place To Go, for example.
For a guy roughly the shape of the character Anger in Pixar’s Inside Out, Meat Loaf has the perfect voice and stage persona for these songs, inextricably linked with Steinman’s songs. Like Queen, enjoy them for how far they go over the top because nobody else does it quite the same.
(Oh yes, and I finally learned that the lyric is "a silver black phantom bike" and not a "a Cilla Black fan on a bike").
Comments
Post a Comment