CLUB NINJA

The Blue Oyster Cult tendency to push their pop flirtations a little too far for the fans they won with their heavier work to stomach strikes yet again here. Club Ninja is to their 1980s output what Mirrors was to their 1970s output - an album where the distinctive Blue Oyster Cult weirdness which remains present on their better pop albums threatens to disappear.

However, whereas Mirrors had some interesting sonic experiments, even if they were quite un-Cultish sonic experiments, here the band spend entirely too much time adopting the sound of utterly generic mid-1980s rock. It's entertainingly and competently done, mind, which is why I don't rate this lower than I do, but at the same time it's highly jarring if what you are expecting is something which sounds like Blue Oyster Cult.

That said, Method to the Madness and Where the War Comes seem to include sniffs of that distinctive Blue Oyster odour, and there seems to be an overarching idea here - a recurring theme of the allure of violence - but to really unpack that further, you'd need to listen to this album a lot, and it's a love-it-or-hate-it prospect - or, rather, a like-it-or- hate it prospect, since I think you're more likely to go "Eh, yeah, this is pretty good" than you are to say "This is FANTASTIC!"