Various Artists - Beatles: A Headbashing Tribute

You’ve Helter Skelter to thank…

Some hardened Beatlites will tell you that Helter Skelter is the world’s first heavy rock song. Funnily enough though, no-one’s covered it on this star-studded line up of Beatles ‘done metal’. There’s a sense of the too knowing, with the sleeve, a pastiche of Yesterday & Today’s infamous ‘butcher cover’ (illustrated, and gorier) leading the way in to a ‘what can we do to make a point’ compilation. So instead of extracting the metal out of songs that really could get successfully bent out of shape, we have Billy Idol yelling needless ‘Oh yeah!’s over the top of a Tomorrow Never Knows that never quite gels, but has the feeling of an overwrought point. Elsewhere, Anthrax’s John Bush turns in a plain trad version of I Feel Fine, and Mötley Crüe’s John Corabi takes I Saw Her Standing There well into irony-free pastiche. In truth, there could be a great album here. Lemmy’s Back In The USSR charmingly sounds as though he has literally just walked off the plane. Best of all is Alice Cooper, who astutely picks opener Hey Bulldog and, with Steve Vai, offers the most layered and successful of all the covers. 

Restless | REST 73801

Reviewed by Jason Draper
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