18 Years Later Snls Iconic more Cowbell Tribute to Blue Ãâ¶yster Cult Is Still Pretty Damn Funny

Various Artists: Dominance and Submission: A Tribute to Blue Öyster Cult

Although they were and remain hugely successful, there's still a strong argument to be made that rock behemoths Blue Öyster Cult – still around and in pretty good shape – are one of the great underrated bands of the 1970s. This tribute album doesn't really make that argument, but it's a lot of fun nonetheless. The first four or five BÖC albums – and especially the first two, where the tone was set by Bill Gawlik's enigmatic artwork – blended heavy riffs, catchy melodies and opaque, intriguing quasi-occult lyrical concepts in a way that was simultaneously commercial and slightly forbidding. But at the same time, they were also just purveyors of great rock/proto-metal anthems, and it's mostly that aspect of their work that is being celebrated here.

The tribute was the brainchild of the late Steve "Thee Slayer Hippy" Hanford, drummer of hardcore punks Poison Idea – with proceeds from the release going to his widow – and Ripple Music promises an "all-star" album, but fans of the top 40 needn't get too excited; the nearest thing on the album to a household name, aside from "Thee Slayer Hippy" himself, is the great (and tragically, now late) Mark Lanegan, who appears with his Queens of the Stone Age bandmate Nick Oliveri and Quasi's Sam Coomes as a member of the Cosmo-Daemonic Telegraph Company on a grizzled but energetic and authentic version of "Dominance and Submission." The Kyuss/QOTSA connection is key; whereas BÖC's own sound was, especially compared to their contemporaries Black Sabbath, geared towards the smooth, glossy end of what then constituted heavy rock, the music here is generally more in the gnarled post-Sabbath stoner rock and psych mold, with bands and artists like Tony Reed (Mos Generator, Stone Axe, etc.), Howling Giant and Spindrift. On the whole though, it's a good fit and works well.

The opening "ME 262" by Mondo Machine is typical – it's a good, tough and pretty faithful version of one of BÖC's more rowdy tunes, but without Eric Bloom's voice and Buck Dharma's crystalline lead guitar, it has a rougher, almost Hawkwind-like feel; not necessarily a bad thing, but a significantly different atmosphere from that encountered on Secret Treaties. In fact, that most striking aspect of BÖC – that even their heaviest tunes often have a calm and strangely hushed sense of menace – is mostly lost on Dominance and Submission which, in a nutshell, is mostly an energetic, invigorating album with a strong stoner/psych vibe. And listened to in that spirit, it's great. Among the highlights is a fantastically heavy, lumbering, Electric Wizard-like performance of "Wings Wetted Down" by IT, here featuring Andrea Vidal of Holy Grove and famed producer/engineer Billy Anderson (Melvins, Clutch, Fu Manchu, etc.). Although it lacks the elegance of the original, especially Albert Bouchard's nimble drumming, it makes up for it with sheer weight of sound and the heightened spookiness of Vidal's hypnotic vocals. Similarly, Howling Giant wisely realized that you can't make "Godzilla" too heavy and the bass on their version of the song alone is enough to destroy Tokyo.

This approach doesn't work with everything however – and two of the band's most catchy and commercial singles "Fireworks" and the immortal "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" are good on their own terms but less satisfying as covers, the former being given an almost entirely different melody in the chorus and the latter puzzlingly played without its iconic guitar part (though the cowbell is there). "Flaming Telepaths" and the great "Cities on Flame with Rock and Roll" fare better though, and kudos to Ape Machine for venturing beyond the '70s classics to cover Fire of Unknown Origin's ripe-for-sampling "Veteran of the Psychic Wars." Any good tribute album does two things: entertain the listener and remind them of how great the original artist is. On those counts, Dominance and Submission does a fine job, as well as being for a good cause, so it's recommended to hard rock, and especially stoner/psych fans, even if a side-by-side comparison tends to accentuate just how unique and unassailable Blue Öyster Cult were in their heyday.

Summary Stoner rock musicians pay fitting tribute to Blue Öyster Cult's heaviness but paint a slightly one-dimensional portrait of the '70s cult heroes.	70 % Light-heavyweight

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Source: https://spectrumculture.com/2022/02/24/various-artists-dominance-and-submission-a-tribute-to-blue-oyster-cult-review/