Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Mötley Crüe
Label: SPV Records
Release: 2006
Running time: 104:04
Rating: 3/5
Mötley Crüe, reunited last year, also hit the road last year on a concert tour that turned out to be one of the most-attended tours of 2005. They definitely have their huge fan base to thank for that, because musically Mötley Crüe haven’t meant anything special to the world in ages. At the same time, the big numbers were also fueled by the media frenzy around Tommy Lee’s forever turbulent, finally collapsed relationship with the, year after year more visibly plastic-fantastic, “superwoman” Pamela Anderson. Interest in the band was also stirred up, totally out of the blue, by their very well-selling autobiography “The Dirt”.
After the first-ever Mötley Crüe DVD, “Carnival Of Sins”, got snapped up in no time, it now gets this follow-up as a double audio live disc. The original idea was for the double live CD to come out only at Walmart, i.e. on US soil, but they finally took pity on Europe too.
Anyway, “Carnival Of Sins” is the band’s second double CD after “Live: Entertainment Or Death” (1999). The predecessor naturally has all the band’s biggest classics, which God forbid they’d ever leave out of their set. The only downside is that on “Live: Entertainment Or Death” we only get the best material from the whole Mötley Crüe legacy, recorded at various spots around planet Earth between 1982 and 1999, which means the listener can’t experience a complete concert recording in one piece from a single location, and that’s exactly what “Carnival Of Souls” delivers. Its first disc is stacked with the band’s biggest hits. You simply can’t go wrong when you open a show with Shout At the Devil and follow it up with Too Fast For Love, Red Hot, Looks That Kill and so on in the same vein. The second disc, though, is the glaring weak spot of this release, its value dropping especially low with song choices like Sick Love Song or If I Die Tomorrow and the downright dismal Anarchy In The UK. Still, in the end this is a document that fans of the band absolutely have to own. Despite their musical creative drought, Mötley Crüe have been living a more than decent celebrity life in recent years off their naughty reputation, which can brush up against scandal whenever they feel like it, and they’re sort of announcing that they’re still far from dead on stage, even though, when you see them and think about everything that must have been coursing through their veins and the torture all the other vital organs of these musicians have been through, you’d mercifully ship them off to a retirement home.
Judging by guitarist Mick Mars’s statement that Mötley Crüe want to push the boundaries of their musical genre reach even further with the new studio album, we’ve got nothing good to look forward to. So I’d rather spin “Too Fast For Love” (1982) one more time.
Lineup
Vince Neil – vocals
Mick Mars – guitar
Nikki Sixx – bass
Tommy Lee – drums
Track list
CD 1.:
1. Shout At The Devil
2. Too Fast For Love
3. Ten Seconds To Love
4. Red Hot
5. On With The Show
6. Too Young To Fall In Love
7. Looks That Kill
8. Louder Than Hell
9. Live Wire
10. Girls, Girls, Girls
11. Wild Side
CD 2.:
1. Don’t Go Away Mad (Just Go Away)
2. Primal Scream
3. Glitter
4. Without You
5. Home Sweet Home
6. Dr. Feelgood
7. Same Ol Situation
8. Sick Love Song
9. If I Die Tomorrow
10. Kickstart My Heart
11. Helter Skelter
12. Anarchy In The UK
