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Blue Öyster Cult - Blue Öyster Cult CD (album) cover

BLUE ÖYSTER CULT

Blue Öyster Cult

 

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3.43 | 239 ratings

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Queen By-Tor
Special Collaborator
Honorary Collaborator
3 stars Heavy metal starts to take form.

Emerging form their late 60s phychadellia demos, Soft White Underbelly renames themselves Blue Oyster Cult, and releases a very promising debut. This album showcases a young band without permanent direction, and though it does have pieces that sound like the band eventually would, the most of the album sounds very "searching". One band member very much worth meantioning at this point is the also newly named guitarist Buck Dharma, who is increadably sharp on this recording, both with writting and playing his parts, other members of the band also shine, but not quite as brightly, for example we see a young Eric Bloom here who has not quite found his "voice" yet.

The songs offered on this album are all quite good, and all have thier moments, but some stand out above the rest. TRANSMANIACON MC is a great opener, leading us into the album with some pulsing heavy metal and good performances by all until we're into some storytelling, which is really where the band's progressive essence is. I'M ON THE LAMB... is a good example of this storytelling, though a bit n the midpaced side, and ... THE LAST DAYS OF MAY furthers this troubadoric approach, but in a slower fashion, actually ending up as a huge standout on the album. Some of the other songs are quite well performed, but with some fairly amature sounding lyrics, case in point: STAIRWAY TO THE STARS and SHE'S AS BEAUTIFUL AS A FOOT. Both good, but the lyrics don't hold their own quite as well as the instumentation. Where the biggest standouts on the album lie, however, is with the still- psychadellic SCREAMS, which is an amazing track (and a sound never to be followed up on), and the ever heavy CITIES ON FLAME... (the sound which they would evolve off of.), with it's crunching riff and sharp vocals.

All in all a good album that shows the start of a band with limitless potential, potential that, unfortunately, they'd never truely live up to. They have some good discs in their -ography, and this is definately one of the finer moments. 3.5 stars.

Queen By-Tor | 3/5 |

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