THE ALBUM OF THE DAY IS… UGLY KID JOE, MENACE TO SOBRIETY
By the time Ugly Kid Joe released this album in 1995, after scoring the hit “Everything About You,” MTV had long fogotten about them in favor of bands like Bush and other post-Nirvana acts that badly needed to be lost forever in a tragic plane crash. Too bad; every band promises their next album will be heavier, but Ugly Kid Joe are one of the only bands that actually delivered on this promise. At the start of their career, UKJ looked like beach bums and sounded like the Crue, but by this point they were playing full-on metal without sacrificing any of the low-brow wit of their earlier offering: the wailing, groove-laden intro that lead into the punishing riff of “God” (chorus: “Everybody’s got the wrong religion!”), the nimble, dizzying guitars that power “Milkman’s Son,” the classic-rawk fantasy of the afterlife “Jesus Rode a Harley,” which pre-dated DevilDriver’s similarly themed “I Dreamed I Died” by almost a decade (“Moses used to sniff the lines/ Noah used to rock the boat sometimes/ Mary used to get undone/ Jesus rode a Harley Davidson”). Fuck, this album even has a surprisingly effective, totally creepy cover of the song the Oompa Loompa’s sing in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (with a slight change of lyrics: “Oompa Loompa, doo-bit-ee-doo/ I’ve got another riddle for you/ When you lie in your bed/ We’ll come and kill you dead.”). The Kids even tossed in some gentle, true-blue (not power) ballads (“Cloudy Skies” and “Candle Song”) to slow things down; but these more pensive tracks are every bit as good as the heavier material. Ugly Kid Joe were a fun band that never got their due, and now, as if to pay the world back for ignoring them, they’ve gone off and joined nu-metal bands and produced Evansuckence albums. Good job, everybody.
-AR
Buy Menace to Sobriety
