You know you’ve got a winner of a record when the best thing about it is the thinly-veiled pun in the title, this one of course alluding to the fact that this band’s primary appeal is that their frontwomen are almost always bare-chested.
(Hey, look! Boobies!)
Actually, that’s not true. The best thing about the record is the album cover that borrows more-than-liberally from Guns N’ Roses’ 1989 EP, GN’R Lies. The similarities are far too obvious to be anything but homage, and while Butcher Babies is to Guns N’ Roses c. 1989 what cat urine is to whisk(e)y, at least someone in Century Media’s art department has good taste.
don’t need to buy none of your / leftover nu-metal today.”
So those are the two best things about Uncovered, and maybe you should stop reading now. Because beyond those, well…
Like Lies, this is a stopgap, filling some time after the band’s debut Goliath and, I’m guessing, before a follow-up that hopefully won’t happen before the Earth falls into the sun. There are five songs here, allegedly all covers. One is ZZ Top’s boogie-rock classic “Beer Drinkers & Hell Raisers,” also once covered by Motorhead; another is a take on Napolean XIV’s 1966 novelty hit “They’re Coming To Take Me Away”; and one is a remake of the Osmonds’ “Crazy Horses.” None of the press that I could find reveals the band that originally released “Don’t Give A Fuck,” and five further minutes of Google searching also didn’t tell me. (To be fair, having heard it, if I had written it, I wouldn’t claim it either.) The press release also neglected to mention that “Pussy Whipped” is a remake of the S.O.D. tune, but at least Google solved that mystery.
Of the covers the band at least cares to promote, first up is “Beer Drinkers,” stripped of its boogie and given instead the Babies’ signature leaden, knuckle-dragging groove. Infectious and designed to garner the cheers of a thousand drunken rednecks in arena rock shows, the original chorus melody is replaced with the type of chanted snarl that was custom-made for fourteen-year-olds to group-scream in faux rebellion at the Ozzfest side-stage a decade ago. Virtually everything good about the ZZ Top song is removed, leaving only the lyrics and maybe some bare-bones basic tonality.
In both this and the original versions, “They’re Coming To Take Me Away” wears out its welcome in less than a minute, so at least Butcher Babies got that part right – the original is drums and spoken word only; here it’s the Marilyn Manson half-sung spooky-kid whisper atop “Beautiful People”-ish tribal drumming. As with “Beer Drinkers,” this feels like a leftover from fifteen years ago, akin to the late-90s spate of ironic 80s synth-pop covers saturated with mallcore angst.
In its initial mid-70s incarnation, “Crazy Horses” is a surprisingly adept hard rocker, the only one from a group far better known for squeaky-clean teen pop and Jesus-y schmaltz. Here, it’s bouncy but bad for different reasons, the chorus devolving into a broken-down shambles that loses the miniscule amount of pit-baiting goodwill that was built up in the verses. The press material claims that Donny Osmond praised this cover, but surely that’s because he’s a Mormon and he’s not allowed to say bad things. (Thankfully I suffer from neither concern.)
It should be news to no one that Butcher Babies is a pretty much a marketing plan in music’s clothing. Two Playboy bunnies mostly minus shirts, rhythms masquerading as riffs, a stylistic mash-up of favorite influences learned from the front page of Hit Parader a decade ago, all cut-and-styled aggression and posturing… At least they have the good sense to cite the Plasmatics as an inspiration, since they’re copping Wendy’s attitude and electrical tape, but there’s nothing here remotely as rebellious or expressive as Williams’ full-on assault. As a band, these Babies are as overly calculated as pi to the billionth degree, and they’re every bit as boring. As an EP, Uncovered is as unnecessary to the life of the average person as knowing those last 999,999,998 decimal places.
But hey, look! Boobies!
