The Blue Oyster Cult: Once, Twice, Scream, Stop!

Musicians are probably the most misunderstood animals in the world. So many myths and legends are believed about them that it is truly difficult for fans to learn the facts. The fact of the matter is they're no better than you or me. Like for example, when the musicians in the Blue Oyster Cult get onstage, there's magic in the air (even the name, O. Cult — occult, get it?): but they all eat chicken, just like the rest of us.

The members of the group have names too. Albert the drummer is quite a primitive, he could play a whole set with hands instead of sticks and sometimes he does. Joe his brother is quiet and he's nice, but he plays the proverbial real mean bass. Donald the lead guitarist has been trying out a wide variety of moustaches lately which — just like his music — really make the little girls swoon. Allen, who is not too vain to wear eyeglasses in live performance, literally tickles the ivories. And Eric is very skinny and always will be, because he has an ulcer, but his voice is truly very fat.

Altamont wah-wah: Now the music. They just finished their first album for Columbia and it's gonna be out any second now. It may seem like outrageous overstatement at this stage of the game, but it could well be the album of the 70's. And "Transmaniacon M.C." starts things off. This is a story of Altamont (the M.C. stands for motorcycle club), with excellent motorcycle singing and cymbals and bagpipe wah-wah guitar. Sandy Pearlman wrote the words. (Hey, dig it: Sandy Pearl-Man and the Blue Oyster Cult!) The second cut on side one, "I'm on the Lam But I Ain't No Sheep," is a real foot-stomper of a tune with a cowboy sound, which is not to say that it's a country-western song. The repetitions within the song make for a comfortable familiarity even on the first hearing. And in this case repetition is by no means dull! In the break the boys sing "mush you huskies now," which can sound like "mucky wucky time," and that works just as well. And does it ever build: see it all happen, once, twice, scream, end! Then comes "Then Came the Last Days Of May," which brings a tear to your eye every time you hear it. They're out on the desert where "a little bit of water goes a long way." The vocal harmonies sound female, the intro is like The Doors' "Strange Days," and it leaves with a tambourine sound you want and expect.

Brooklyn Dodger blues: Next is "Stairway to the Stars." a hand-clappy happy tune. The song's all about autographs and car insurance and it contains a musical theme which builds little stairways in your mind. It's got the right words pitted against the right notes, analogous to the painter-philosopher Kandinsky's theory about the right color for the right form. Finishing off side one is "Before the Kiss a Red Cap." Wow again! It's reminiscent of the Brooklyn Dodgers, if you know what I mean; and the theme is the really tragic story of someone named Suzy. There's a children-like rhythm section in there with wood blocks and sticks, and let me tell you kids themselves are rarely this good!

Side two screams out with "Screams," echoes reverberating "big city madness." Its bell-like crystal sound really sums up the nights and lights of the city, any city. Next: "She's As Beautiful As a Foot." There are at least two uses of the word "tongue" in the song (one of which is the tongue of a shoe), which is only natural since R. Meltzer — rock writer and father of the unknown tongue — wrote the lyrics. The vibrations of the song make your adam's apple feel weird. In "City's On Flame With Rock and Roll" the title speaks for itself. Fire and ice. "Telescopes" talks about seeing with your eyes closed and it ends with a space ship about to take off, only to come back into the remarkable final cut of this remarkable album, "Redeemed." If there was ever a catchy ballad this is it, with the most effective use of lisping these jaded ears have ever heard. It's all about Christmas day and the cold, cold singing sends chills up and down your spine; and that's no joke. It ends with "it won't be long" and it won't be long before this album is in your stores, so start salivating now!

Roni Hoffman || Circus

The Top of Pop - The Blue Oyster Platter

On the front cover, under a black and starry sky, are buildings and a railroad track extending to infinity. On the back cover, equally surreal, are an infinity of rooms with doors but no windows or ceiling. Don't ever look at them when you're feeling paranoid; they'll frighten you.

The Blue Oyster Cult, native to Long Island, have finally made an album, and the cover pictures of a country you have never seen are properly descriptive of the music they enclose - the familiar made menacing, yet, ultimately, dream-like and tender. It is a strange album and as fascinating as a snake.

When I heard this group live a few months ago, and I must point out that everyone was in a very mellow mood that night, I screamed out that it was cosmic and the music of the spheres. That holds for the record, but only after about the fifth or sixth playing.

You have to devote at least one hearing to the lead guitar alone. Donald (Buck Dharma) Roeser is a completely original guitarist who not only doesn't copy other people but also hardly ever repeats himself. He does something really interesting and eye-popping on every single cut.

Listen to the way the album starts and notice how he can make the instrument convey cold horror without all that tacky cheap screaming that has made so much "heavy" rock so impossible to listen to any more.

Because of a truly dumb decision not to include the lyrics, you have to play the album three times for the lyrics alone. Even then, you're better off with a lyric sheet, which you can get by writing an irate letter to Murray Krugman, Columbia Records, 51 W. 52nd St. New York, N.Y. 10019, and enclosing this column. That'll show them what a mistake they made.

The record opens with a song called "Transmaniacon M.C." about a motor cycle club (that's what the M.C. stands for) that spreads terror at Altamont.

The lyrics ("Pure nectar of antipathy/behind that stage at dawn") are sheer poetry, as are the lyrics of "Before the Kiss, a Redcap," which has nothing to do with railroad porters and a lot to do with a bar in Long Island where the gin glows in the dark and the patrons' thoughts grow too big for their skulls.

Sandy Pearlman, the eccentric writer and poet who has become the group's resident lyricist, manager and honorary transmaniac, likes images of violence redeemed by beauty - lips like swollen roses, ice too thick to be sliced by the light, sailors with black telescopes.

It is very exciting to see how completely the band has been able to get into his head and into the head of another famous eccentric, Richard Meltzer, who has contributed two of my personal favorites, "Stairway to the Stars" and "She's as Beautiful as a Foot." This last, he told me, was inspired by a former lead singer with the group whose face, Richard swears, did look like a foot. In the song, when you bite the face, it tastes like (what else?) a fallen arch.

"Cities on Flame with Rock and Roll" ("Three thousand guitars/my ears will melt...") is the one getting all the airplay, and the third from last song on the LP. It is supposed to be the climax of the violence. I'm more turned on by the first half when everything, lyrics, lead guitar and the complete unity of the band, all come as a constant surprise.

But the band likes the second half best, and who knows by the eighteenth listening what the rest of us will think? This is a band about which I'd be very interested to hear your opinion, but please, only after at least five plays and a close study of the lyrics.

Lillian Roxon || Daily News

Blue Oyster Cult
Columbia 31063
Released: May 1972
Chart Peak: #172
Weeks Charted: 8

Through a combination of circumstances, New York has never been a spawning ground for very many good, enduring white rock 'n' roll bands. The Velvet Underground spring readily to mind, and the Rascals, and there have been several fine oneshots that never got the attention they deserved, like the Good Rats and Autosalvage. But the Big Apple, as us farmboys call it, hasn't really come through with solid rockout organizations too often. Now, with the Blue Oyster Cult, New York has produced its first authentic boogie beast, and with any like this one should be around for awhile.

Sandy Pearlman, one of the Cult's managers, modestly described this album as "better than Killer, but not quite as good as Master of Reality." While I can't honestly say that they have yet attained the degree of maniacal control held by either Alice or Black Sabbath, they do have the formula down better than most bands in recent memory, and not only that, but at times they sound a lot like the Music Machine, of "Talk Talk" and one-black-glove-on-each-member's-pick-hand fame, not to mention the whole 1965-6-7 acid-fuzztone-feedback-freakout genre. Which means in front that they have achieved a highly delicate synthesis, uniting the noise which some of us old farts of 23 grew up on and loved with the Zeppelin-Sabbath-Grand Funk juggernaut-rock which many of us have had so much trouble with and which "the kids," of course, thrive on. And that means that the potential audience for a band of this type is very large indeed.

Their first album is an almost too-perfect melange of highly proximate style that, due to production with a definite lack of laser flash and technicolor presence, tends to sound rather mundane, almost monotonous at first. But once you get into it -- and by the second playing you can't help but begin to hear all the great ideas and deft touches -- it'll grab you and move inevitably to the font of your play-pile.

Contrasts abound: "Cities On Flame With Rock and Roll" is the group's big Black Sabbath move, complete with deep gutty guitar slices and triumphantly sociopathic lyrics ("My heart is black/And my lips are cold/Cities on flame/With rock and roll/3000 guitars/They seem to cry/My ears will melt/And then my eye"). "Workshop of the Telescopes" is prototype sci-fi rock, but Merlin-fantasy as opposed to Pink Floyd's and Kantner/Slick's Star Trek fixations, while "She's As Beautiful As A Foot" is as misterioso as any Doors song, although the vocal sounds more like Sky Saxon of the Seeds: "Didn't believe it when he bit into her face/It tasted just like a fallen arch." You would have to hear it to realize just how haunted they can make those words sound; camp it ain't.

"Screams" is the ultimate psychedelic paranoia fantasy, beating Grand Funk's "Paranoid" for sure though maybe not Black Sabbath's classic of the same name and sounding somewhat like Neil Young's "Out of My Mind" plasticised and distended by the Shadows of Knight into a quiet schizo raveup. The identification with the deranged social rebel originally called for in Norman Mailer's The White Negro continues in "Transmaniacon M.C.," a song about Altamont told, if from a rather fanciful distance (bikers never say, "So clear the road m' bully boys"), from the Angels' point of view, which I find a refreshing tack to say the least. And it sounds the most like the Music Machine of anything here.

But there are two songs that rise above the rest to become methodical, compressed statements in two different styles that really define what rock 'n' roll is all about. "Stairway To The Stars" is a modified boogie with MC5 overtones -- modified in the sense that you take an old Ford and turn it into a rod -- about superstar arrogance and loving every minute of it: "You can drive my motorcar/It's insured to 30 thou." Cool. Words, as on "She's As Beautiful As A Foot," by one R. Meltzer. Kid writes dame fine lyrics, even if he is a rock critic.

"Then Came the Last Days of May," and everybody got somebody else's kicks. Probably the first song on the record to leap out and make you realize that something's happening in here, it's a poignant rock 'n' roll ballad utilizing expert guitar work to create the paradoxical exhilaration that comes form the artful sketching of a mightily depressing situation. The lyrics tell the whole tale: "Three good buddies were laughin' and smokin' in the back of a rented Ford/They couldn't know they weren't goin' far... The sky is bright, the traffic light/Now and then a truck/And they hadn't seen a cop around all day (Brief choral interjection: "What luuuck!")/They brought everything they needed/Bags and scales to weight the stuff/The driver said the border's just over the bluff..." Followed by a quietly ominous guitar solo and the ghastly denouncement; it's a teen tragedy of our time. Of such stuff are great songs made.

I don't think you should miss this album. It sounds a wee bit too calculated, and there is the lack of all-out do-or-die mania, the kind of mania epitomized by the Stooges and Black Pearl at its core, as I find missing in Alice Cooper and Led Zeppelin. But that probably doesn't matter too much. Everybody loves being manipulated by Cooper and Zep, and despite the higher degree of consciousness which belies adolescent urgency in its purest form, the rushes are just about as gratifying. And the Blue Oyster Cult does possess and understand The Sound as we've known and loved it -- it's as beautiful as a foot.

Lester Bangs || Rolling Stone

Blue Oyster Cult - S/T (Columbia)

About five years ago, I was one of a small group of people who were responsible for putting out a magazine called Crawdaddy! Back in those days, things were quite different from today. For one thing, there weren't very many rock magazines. There was Hit Parader, and Mojo Navigator on the West Coast, and maybe Cheetah, and the usual teeny garbage, but mostly the only ones we took seriously were the stories in the back of Hit Parader and all of Mojo Navigator, which seemed to come from another world. So we felt pretty self-righteous about being the most intellectually sound rock publication in New York.

Naturally, with the dearth of rock magazines, there was a dearth of rock critics, a situation which, I reflect today, was ideal. Mainly the ones, we came into contact with were this guy Landau who lived in Boston and got us our hi-fi equipment cheap because his old man owned the company, and the Long Island Crew. I never made it out to Stony Brook, myself, but these people had a very highly-evolved scene going for themselves out there, with the first light show on the East Coast, avant-garde rock shows they produced themselves, featuring the East Coast debuts of such groups as the Doors, Moby Grape, and many others. They also had a rock band which everybody talked about but none of us had ever heard, called the Soft White Underbelly, who were apparently signed to Elektra. The Long Island Crew, consisting most vocally of Sandy Pearlman and Richard Meltzer, would talk about how nice it was to have a rock band that someday they could produce and help write songs for, and for a while, I believe, Meltzer was their featured vocalist.

Time passed, and I left Crawdaddy!, as did everybody else who had been involved with it. Meltzer went on to heights of fame with the book we'd previewed in Crawdaddy! #8 (I typed the entire issue, including Meltzer's article - called "The Beatles, The Stones, and the Raunch Epistemology of Spydet Turner," and it wasn't until the third typing of it that I understood what it was about), called "The Aesthetics of Rock." Pearlman, it developed, was spending more and more time with the band, which went from being the Soft White Underbelly to the Stalk-Forrest Group. Since the band was so inextricably bound to all these writer-types, a good deal of the rock writing that came out of New York was loaded with sly and not-so-sly references to it. What I mean is, the air was getting polluted with hype.

Elektra apparently dropped the group, and the one person I know who has heard the tapes they made (and, being Mojo-Navigator's ex-editor, he was able to listen with an unprejudiced ear) says that they were terrific. It wasn't Elektra's first mistake, nor would it be their last, but it didn't do the group much good, and they changed their name to the Blue Oyster Cult. I still refused to believe anything I heard about them. Critics' bands tend to be over-cute, overloaded with in-jokes, and stuff like that.

Still, when I got the album in the mail, I put it on out of deference to my old buddies. And lemme tell you, what I heard knocked me clean out: Because, underneath it all, the Blue Oyster Cult are a great rock and roll band in the tradition of all the great New York City rock and roll bands - the Rascals, the Blues Project, Autosalvage, the Velvet Underground, the Magicians and many others. They exude a raw, nasty energy that might lead one to say that they are New York City's MC5, although to the best of my knowledge they don't hold near the spell over an audience that the 5 did, mostly because they are from New York, and New York audiences think they're too sophisticated to fall for stuff like that.

There is really no doubt about this album. It's the one we all would have made five years ago if we'd been able to actualize our fondest fantasies. And, just like we would have done in our fantasies, its main fault seems to be a tendency towards over-literacy in the lyrics. But that scarcely matters, because another rule has it that rock lyrics should be semi-indecipherable.

The album's highlights are so numerous that it's hard to list them all. "Then Came The Last Days Of May" has the best lyrics, a chilling story of some kids murdered while buying dope, with a, last verse that lifts it to another level entirely. R. Meltzer himself shows up writing fantastic lyrics to "Stairway To The Stars," and the band propels them along beautifully. "Before The Kiss, A Redcap" has a middle section that you can do the stroll to, believe it or not, and the overdubbed claps are right out of George Martin's Beatle Secrets (bravo, producers!). "Cities On Flame With Rock And Roll" doesn't quite live up to its title (only the MC5 could carry off a song with that name, I think), but it's still a great song, sounding sort of like Black Sabbath filtered through Autosalvage. "Redeemed," the last song of the album, turns things around some by pretending to be a sweet country style song, but you'll notice that it isn't, quite.

Whether the Blue Oyster Cult is this good in person I can't say, but there is enough group cohesion on the album for me to think they might well be. This is the most auspicious high-energy debut album since the J. Geils Band's, and one that I've played even more times than Geils'. It shows a good deal about where rock in this country has been and where it could go with a little luck. With a couple of good breaks and some decent exposure, the Blue Oyster Cult could become one of America's greatest high-energy bands.

You could even help. Buy the album!

Ed Ward || Creem

Blue Oyster Cult (Columbia 31063)

NEVER JUDGE a fellow earthling by the way he/she looks; this was perhaps the first lesson I gleaned from the Blue Oyster Cult - upon perusing a photo of the group, I prejudged them to be but nerds. Then I heard the album. Results? Penatial self-flagellation and a Regis Debray haircut.

The Blue Oyster Cult (the reason for the umlaut over the oscular vowel in the group's name is, like such matters as the Mayan codices and the Necronomicon, best left undelved into) are involved in post-literate lyrics and post-taste music.

Who else, with the minutely possible exception of The Holy Modal Rounders, would venture to not only perform and record, but also flaunt, a song titled 'I'm On the Lamb But I Ain't No Sheep'? Or construct an entire song around being offered a Tuinol from the whiskey-drenched tongue-tip of some sleazeferal endomorph in a Long Island bar ('Before the Kiss, a Redcap' - which also includes one of the most eerily sensual images in modern hieratix, that of bottles of "gin that glows in the dark")?

And the regressive post-literate is as fully represented as the obsessive decadent strain of 'Before the Kiss, a Redcap' and others such as 'Transmaniacon M.C.' (an homage/pieta to Mars/Set qua biker punch-punch) and 'Workshop of the Telescopes' - there's the spooky infantilism of 'Beautiful As a Foot' ("She's as beautiful as a foot/She heard someone say/The other day") and the homicidal 'Stairway to the Stars'.

And the cover's got an upside-down ankh coupled with one of the most brain-waiving exercises in graphic perspective around. So come out to where theta-wave jukeboxes moil in the gaseous strata of Neptune. Come out to where religious icons bear the desecration-scars of too many sardonic A-minors. Come out to where grim, light-drooling gods etch the likenesses of amphetamine-raven ebb-forms into Plutonian barroom floors. Come to Blue Oyster Cult country.

Nick Tosches || Fusion

Blue Oyster Cult (Columbia)

If you haven't heard this album yet (and knowing how little you people care about new groups you probably haven't), you better run out and buy it quick. 'Cause the Cult's next album is gonna tear across the nation just like J. Geils' second album did, and if you get this one, you can be there to say "I told you so."

There is absolutely no reason in the world why these bums shouldn't take over the world of 70's rock'n'roll. They're the best new band of this year, and the fact that there's been almost no serious competition doesn't take anything away from them. Their first record is a rock'n'roll testament: a document that will taste great if eaten and even better if played over and over.

This ain't no new album, either. It's been lying on my turntable for months and months now, and sometimes it plays itself without my hands touching the knobs. But there's something that's been holding back on my telling you all about it. Probably greed - or maybe that the time just wasn't right.

Well, they'll be here a week from tonight, so I guess now's as good a time as any. Of course, the Cult couldn't care less about all of this, being a punk band in the best sense of the word.

Arguments rage among the various contingents as to whether the Cult play the music of the future - the rock to be. Personally, I never think about it. I just go nuts every time I hear them. There's a freshness, a sense of new beginnings, a feeling of breakthrough, together with a vague sense of familiarity and having heard it somewhere before, in the back of your psyche.

If I had my way, I'd put the whole album on side one, so I wouldn't have to forsake the first side for the second when "Before the Kiss, a Redcap" ends. The album starts with "Transmaniacon MC," a tender folk ballad about love between man and motorcycle. Actually, it's about Altamont, as seen from the eyes of an angel. You know, two sides to every story, etc.

Starting with the first of a series of ultimate riffs and tongues that appear throughout the record, it really sounds like an S. Clay Wilson strip set to music, complete with Tree Frog beer and the Checkered Demon. The song is absolutely devastating in its sense of attack and killer potential realized.

By no mistake, the producers are Sandy Pearlman and Murray Krugman, with assistance by ace maniac R. Meltzer. This is a critic's band all the way, seriously thought out before execution. Meltzer contributes lyrics on "She's as Beautiful as a Foot," a glorious perverted love song. The album's words are about murder, rock stardom, "Stairways to the Stars," redcaps - all those lovely realities that very few bands have the balls to talk about.

"Cities on Flame with Rock'n'Roll" has all of urban civilization melting in the face of three thousand guitars while the children dance. Flesh and steel succumb to the omnipotent force of pure tongue. Lead guitarist Buck Dharma is one of the most fear inspiring guitarists I've every been steamrolled over by.

On each tune, he comes from nowhere in blazing, uncompromising notes such as I've never encountered anywhere but Hendrix. Eric Bloom is great singer in the best punk tradition of Lou Reed and Sky Saxon. The Bouchard brothers, Joe and Albert, handle bass and drums respectively, and Albert is terror on the skins.

Though Lester got in print first, you all should know that Fernbacher snuffed them out immediately as being direct descendants to the year of 1965, and, more specifically, the Music Machine, Sean Bonniwell's gone and certainly forgotten battallion of gloved warriors. This album is the essence of "Talk Talk." Real storm trooper stuff.

Before this turns into a manifesto, let's just say that now is the time for... Look, if you're sick of lamo rock (that's you, and Mr. and Ms. Grateful Dead) and you'd love nothing better than to cut off both of Marmadukes' ears, join the Blue Oyster Cult on their journey to oblivion. On, Mush, you Huskies!

Billy Altman || Spectrum

Blue Oyster Cult (CBS 64904)

This is the much-vaunted American band composed, I believe, of rock and roll critics - and certainly championed by them as THE underground band. Its cult appeal has been carefully fostered, and if this is what happens when the men who write the reviews get behind the instruments, then I can only say: Back to your typewriters!

It's a dense, hard, riffy music without great finesse... but then finesse is not what punk-rock is about, I suppose. Lead guitarist Donald Roeser wails away over some powerful, churning rhythms from a thick, unsubtle rhythm section. There appear to be three guitarists and it all gets a bit overbearing at times, though really there are some nice touches - "Then Came The Last Days Of May" is based on a pleasing idea and when they tone it down, give each other some room, exploit the use of space a little, then the music becomes quite acceptable.

"Redeemed" is nice, with more intelligent use of dynamics, but most of the rest is undistinguished, like trying to tell the difference between being hit on the head with a ten-pound hammer and a twenty-pound hammer - either way it gets to you.

This album was recorded way back in October 1971, though it has only just been released by CBS, so I would imagine most of the people who wanted it would have it by now. I don't want to give the impression that this is a rotten album - the playing never drops below competent, but it's the competence of slightly outdated heavy-psychedelic rock or whatever, as indicated by the hippy-trippy name.

Maybe it's meant to be a bit of a joke, and as for the bit about the critics... actually they are probably all musicians doing the best they can, but there's a score of British bands who have got albums out who can better this. Put it down to a White Elephant Craze.

Martin Hayman || Sounds

Blue Oyster Cult Bootleg EP (Columbia)

Another in the "legal bootleg" series that record companies come out with every so often, sent out only to record stations and newspapers for extra hype. But the joke's on Columbia here because this "ep" has about 20 minutes of crystal perfect rock 'n' roll.

Recorded in Rochester before a blazing crowd of bikers, the Oysters literally outdo themselves, which is saying quite a bit.

Side one feature "The Red and the Black," an updated version of "I'm on the Lamb (but I ain't no sheep)," with Buck Dharma and Eric Bloom working out over the sounds of huskies and bungo ponies. Then, "Buck's Boogie," an instrumental to end all instrumentals.

More than simply shades of Deep Purple, Buck and the band start at the frenzy point and work out from there. Lot of neat chord changes, some slam band guitar and organ riffs. Killer all the way.

Billy Altman || Spectrum

Plutonian Barrooms - Blue Oyster Cult - Tyranny And Mutation

I was walking home the other night when something happened to me. Just like that. Well, it was a stranger, that is. And he made me a proposition, you'd have to call it, in all due respect.

And what he said was, "Howdja like ta make a couple-some simoleons dere, kiddo?"

I knew what he was up to at once, but of course I didn't let on to him, I just let him go on, I strung him along, actually. I said, "Well, my good man, that depends. What is it that you want me to-"

"Shettup. Time is short and they're after me." Here his voice changed very strangely. "Take these." He handed me a flat parcel. "Here is your fee. I hope we will be satisfied with your work. Your writing will be in the next number, I take it?" All I was about to take at this point was a powder, seeing as he had started changing colors and smelling something fearful. But I took the parcel and the fat envelope. Worry later, I always say.

As I ran, I looked back. He was now ten feet tall and glowing dull red. Then he disappeared in a flash, and I nearly fainted what with the smell.

When I got home I opened the envelope first. It was full of money all right, but it was round and black and didn't have any printing on it. I wondered if Riggs would honor it. It felt heavy.

So then I opened the parcel. (It makes it more mysterious to say parcel, don't you think, not package?) It held, odd to relate, two record albums. So I decided the logical thing would be to play them. This I did. They made me feel funny.

I don't usually dance when I'm alone, but I did now. God, how I danced. I knew I couldn't stop. I screamed at the moon. I took off my clothes. I burned all my books. Even my National Lampoons, which didn't seem so funny any more.

I tried to listen to what they were singing. I didn't really understand what they were talking about, but it seemed exciting in a creepy way:... their tongues extend and then retract.. rise to claim Saturn, ring and sky.. Baby, that's the breaks !.. behind the bush there lurks a girl...

I just heard a noise in the alley. I look toward the window, which is creeping open and - NO! NOT HERE! YOU!? I DIDN'T MEAN THAT'! I-

*****

The MS. ends here. What became of the writer is not known. Little can be concluded with certainty at this point, but we may derive help from the eminent post-literary scholar Nich Tosches, who wrote last year:

So come out to where theta-wave jukeboxes moil in the gaseour strata of Neptune. Come out to where religious icons bear the desecration-scars of too many sardonic A-minors. Come out to where grim, light-drooling gods etch the likenesses of amphetamine-raven ebb-forms into Plutonian barroom floors. Come to Blue Oyster Cult country.

Mark Sawtelle || The Hoya

Blue Oyster Cult: Tyranny and Mutation

YOU MIGHT remember my brief mention of Blue Oyster Cult's new album in the heavy metal piece. That was after only one listen, however, and I really shoulda known better. You have to remember the context, though. Blue Oyster Cult's great first LP, an absolute mind-boggling unreleased live album, and then...

A real disappointment. Tyranny and Mutation just doesn't measure up to the Cult's first studio album in any way, save possibly the marked improvement in engineering. The songs are just nowhere in comparison. In retrospect it seems possible that the first album's material may have been the group's best tunes as accumulated over several years. In any event, it looks like Blue Oyster Cult just don't have the standout songwriting capacity one might've hoped.

Every cut on the album does have enough deft touches, enough compelling riffs and traces of melody to sufficiently hold your attention, but not once on this entire LP does a fuzz chord ring out with the sort of brashness that almost defines hard rock or metal music. And that's shocking, considering that two months ago I would've considered this band the ultimate heavy metal monsters. The lack of mania here is just as glaring as on their first album, only more pronounced.

Not that there aren't some good things on the album. All four cuts on Side One rock pretty well until '7 Diz-Busters' fizzles out towards the end, with 'Hot Rails To Hell' probably the album's best track. The second side is less distinguished, the songs just barely having enough hooks to make them listenable. Throughout the album, the Cult never do more than flirt with kicking out any jams, and this side is particularly lacking in guts. Too much cutesy shit and cluttered, overly-psychedelic arrangements.

One thing, though. If you ever have the slightest opportunity to get your hands on a copy of Blue Oyster Cult's live promo album, do everything short of risking your life to do so. Not only is it the most crazed high energy recording in the history of rock and roll, but it's probably the closest thing to a definitive hard rock or metal statement ever set to vinyl. The difference between it and the Cult's studio albums, even the first one, is like day and night. Which leaves me feeling the same way as when I sat down to write this review: utterly perplexed. I just can't believe that Blue Oyster Cult aren't capable of words better than this.

Metal Mike Saunders || Phonograph Record

Blue Oyster Cult: Tyranny and Mutation

Blue Oyster Cult is shore some bizarre dudes, but then so's everybody from Long Island's soft white underbelly. Then again, not everybody had a debut LP widely acclaimed as "The Best Ever!" and "the album of the decade." A trip through their new one's like listenin' to Hitchcock and Kubrick swap stories about their wet dreams.

An avalanche of sonic hysteria summons your attention, then it's full speed ahead into "The Red and the Black." Say, don't those lyrics sound familiar? Why it's a remake of that bestial humper from the first LP, "I'm on the Lamb but I Ain't No Sheep." Only this time it's about the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. A weird change in topics, but they still get a man in the end.

A flash of synthesizer fire leads into another familiarity-the riff from the Hollies' "Long Cool Woman." BO-Cult's sure a bunch of perverse mo-fucks, dressing up "OD'd on Life Itself" in such ineffectual swathings. Sorta like Nixon winning the Nobel Peace Prize. And the title, jeez, what a comforting thought, at least the niftiest since the last verse of Black Sabbath's "Supernaut." There's nothing comforting about Don (Buck Dharma) Roeser's guitar, though, it's fuckin' explosive! Jimmy Page's favorite guitarist, you say?

Then there's "Hot Rails to Hell," a brilliant exposition of what the Stones would be playing today if they hadn't turned into such bourgeois hedonist auteurs! Ah, to hear "19th Nervous Breakdown" done '73 style, complete with those scintillating bass runs at the end. Wish no longer-here it is! A crescendo of ear-piercin' pickin' fades into screeching feedback, then "7 Screaming Diz-Busters," the fourth cataclysmic mindfuck in a row. And the tempos, my, they haven't slowed down since the start. Superfast, and a real mind-boggler! And right on, baby, with that Madison Square Garden organ playing. Chiller!!!

Only the most pea-brained nurd could think side two would bring respite from the frenzy. Shit, man, the label's black! Integra-oh, the red and the black, now I get it. What's this? "Baby Ice Dog"-a cold, calculated canticle of agonizing heartbreak and revenge. Then "Wings Wetted Down," a "ballad," no less! Sinister in the extreme. Gripping, too, around the neck-that's another screamin' Dharma solo.

A flush of the turlet and it's R. Meltzer's "Teen Archer," a passionate tale of adolescent sex orgies and the distribution of wealth, Simply killer, and a doozy of a single, if they're so inclined. Some rock critics' bands may have fallen into their mentors' fetishes (like the eclecto-foppishness of Mendelsohn's Christopher Milk and the asexual nihilism of my own Temporary Suicide), but B - cult ain't about to let Meltzer's demented mumblings dominate their slashing style. "Mistress of the Salmon Salt" closes the show on a powerfully jagged note, with its sing-along "quicklime girl" refrain conjuring up images of the Beach Boys on speed. With another flash of that hockey rink organ-banzai!

Am I raving about the album, or just plain raving? Don't know for sure, but I can say that Tyranny And Mutation is the only thing that's budged Paranoid and Heartbreaker off my turntable in a long time. And that's saying a lot! Blue Oyster Cult is one of the best bands America's got. (RS #132)

Gordon Fletcher || Rolling Stone

The Blue Oyster Cult - Tyranny and Mutation (Columbia)

The Blue Oyster Cult's first album knocked a lot of people for a loop last year, because it delivered so much the competition only promised: great original material, short taut takes, instrumental work much tighter than we'd heard in a long time of groaning deadassed excesses. I WANTED TO MOVE AND SO DID YOU, and so did the BOC and so they brought us out of the nod.

It was all so promising that you wondered if there was any way they could sustain and build on those strengths. But they did it! Tyranny and Mutation will blow you over like no record in recent memory.

One of the keys to BOC's power is their endless unbridled energy. When most new bands are coming on like they got all eight clubfeet stuck in a tarpit and are too fuckin' torpid from swamp fever anyway to do anything but bong out a few Sab chords and swat the tsetse flies, these jook savages come cycloning along and jolt you outa your chair, then flatten you against the wall and bash your brains out with laser whips, then smithereen your whole room, then take it to an even more intense level... you feel like slinging all them worthless fuckin' bogus so-called high energy albums out the window and tromping down the street with this one to start some trouble of your own!

You can't ignore it, because as much as they're about frenzy, the BOC are about control. They're obsessed with it to the point of fascism, and they got so much control steering the riptides of this record that you're stunned. They're cold when they want to be (absolutely implacable, like the early Lou Reed could be), never detached, and perhaps the most important thing about Tyranny and Mutation is that even more than their first album it shows that the BOC know how to cook.. That's the mark of a truly great metal band: crackling overloads of pure violence, channeled expertly through all the technology at their disposal, bringing back one cut after another that's as solidly musical as it's vicious.

Most of the material is a clear advance over the first album. "The Red and the Black" ran there as "I'm On the Lamb But I Ain't No Sheep," but don't get cynical, because the version here is so much bigger, more powerful and complex with deep crunching rhythms' and white light/white heat guitars leaping out and hurtling in every direction, that it could be a whole different song. "Hot Rails to Hell" is just as charged, with crazed lead guitar lines out of the finest moments of Alice Cooper and the Stooges, blistering changes and a lurid feel somewhere between American International exploitation flicks and the phosphorescent fantasies of pre-Code comics.

The record has two sides: "The black"/tyranny/methedrine, and "The Red/mutation/quaalude (at least that's how producers Sandy Pearlman and Murray Krugman described it). What that means is not that the BOC are nodding out while grinding their teeth to stumps, but that they've found an almost perfect balance between cold blue steel and white fire, between distance and aggression.

There's a diabolical, menacing strain running through all of it from the fantastic cover art to every song inside. It's a deliberate attempt at a kind of ominous, sinister, almost Burroughsian mystification, coming from a strange zone somewhere between Alice, Black Sabbath, the Stooges and A Clockwork Orange, and you can take it as seriously as you want to, but it works. Just check the song titles. The BOC are often verbally obtuse and the words themselves indistinct, but they succeed regularly in flashing some chrome Orwellian/sleaze tabloid image at you and then whirling away. Two fine exceptions are "Baby Ice Dog," with lyrics by poet Patti Smith that're as phantasmal a transmutation of Mickey Spillane tough guy talk as the rest of her work; and "Teen Archer," another great archetypal song from rock critic R. Meltzer, whose lyrics are brilliant (just check out "Stairway to the Stars" on the first album), spare and slicing. They should record more of hisy songs, because his potential is enormous, fully on a par with that of the band itself.

If this review seems a bit overenthusiastic, even hyperbolic, it's not from first impressions or because so much of the other stuff lately has been bad enough to make you grab at straws of brilliance. It's because this record is every bit as good as I've said it is, as exciting and masterful as its peaks as people like Alice Cooper, the MC5, and even Led Zeppelin and the Yardbirds have been at theirs.

Lester Bangs || Creem

Blue Oyster Cult's Satanic Mystery

Onstage, five raunchy, tough leather boys frantically smash their guitars against the floor—and each other. Their brand of machine gun, teeth-grinding rock sends concert goers into head shaking spasms and into foot-stomping trances. The band is called Blue Oyster Cult, their logo is the Greek symbol of chaos... and their goal is to be "programmed on a music machine to be played on the last day of earth."

Why is this hard driving rock and roll band worshipped by only a few when their music is so often well executed, catchy, intelligent and punk-rooted? Perhaps the band itself has frightened off the masses. Says producer Murray Krugman, one of the two producers of Blue Oyster Cult's new Columbia LP, Tyranny and Mutation, "Nobody wants a group who is obvious... everything about Blue Oyster Cult is kept purposely hidden." And trying to decipher their lyrical meaning is about as difficult as translating the Rosetta Stone. Basically, the LP is conceptual, and the two revolving themes are violence and death. Explains Krugman of the mystery-shrouded group, "They consider themselves a pessimistic killer band."

Choogling on red and black: Tyranny and Mutation, the second LP from this band of Long Islanders, is divided into two concept pieces. One side is simply titled "The Red," the other "The Black." One might hypothesize that you're supposed to listen to the "black" side when speeding away on amphetamines and the "red" side when drifting on downs. But Krugman clarifies the puzzling LP by explaining that Side One (black) represents the band's concept of "Tyranny," or political change, while Side Two (red) stresses cultural change or "Mutation." Ho hum... well, if you're interested in the lyrics to this strange theme, you'll have to send away... they're not enclosed, further increasing the air of satanic mystery, the band seeks to maintain as their image. But there's nothing mysterious about the driving force of their music: as the band sings, "you've O.D.'d on life itself" in penetrating harmonies, they chug out a rattling twelve-bar boogie beat similar to T. Rex's "Get It On." The following "Hot Rails To Hell," is reminiscent of the Rolling Stones Between The Buttons period. And the bone-rattling bass lines that churn through "Wings Wetted" are enough to make Black Sabbath turn purple with envy.

The story of Blue Oyster Cult seems to be veiled in secrecy. Several years ago, a band named Soft White Underbelly achieved some level of infamy in the hard rock underground circuits. Allan Lanier (keyboards and rhythm guitar), Albert Bouchard (drums) and Donald "Buck Dharma" Roeser (lead guitar and vocals) finally decided to dump their vocalist, whom producer Krugman recalls as "an off the wall nothing," and their bass player ("an obnoxious creep"). They picked up Eric Bloom (vocals) and Joe Bouchard (bass) from the remains of a band called the Stalk Forrest Group, and Blue Oyster Cult was born.

Playing with burning fire: From the early days when they hit the charts with "Stairway To The Stars," and "City's On Flame With Rock and Roll," it was obvious that this rather abstract band with the tough guy image and the never-let-up brand of raunch rock sounded like they were heading off into the farthest regions of space. But it now appears clear that it's not rocket ships they're riding — it's motorcycles. And the space-suits won't be insulated against the heat, for the band seems to revel in satanism and hellishness. One story has it that while the band was playing its song "Transmaniacon MC" in Oaxaca, Mexico, two eclipses occurred within minutes of each other, and the band was abruptly plunged into a subtle, irreversible madness. They're mad, they're mysterious, but they're also blood-boiling, corpse-rousing rock and rollers... and it's the music that counts in the end.

Janis Schacht || Circus

Blue Oyster Cult: Tyranny And Mutation (Columbia Import)

WELL, HERE it is then: volume two of Sandy Perlman's boys' collective voyage in the S.S. "Cosmic Greaser Speed-freak" towards strange new worlds of murk and malevolence. The Quest for the Heavy Metal Grail, no less - and, once the formula has been set, the room left for any real surprises is, of course, strictly limited, leaving the primary question to be levelled at this endeavour less What's new?, than What's the point?

Herr Perlman, it appears, is only in it for the thrill of pretended evil plus the fashionable quasi-fascistic reactionary adherence to the Myth of the Screaming Guitar and the Gospel of the Three Power Chords.

An intellectual slumming in a musical shanty-town originally erected by teams of aggressive, tone-deaf, petit-bourgeois youth hell-bent on escaping their parents with feedback and amphetamines, his dream of Svengali-ing the ultimate paranoiac aggression of rock 'n' roll doom-mongers was bound to be a monstrous contrivance from the very beginning.

In fact, when the B.O.C. score it's invariably in spite of the crass Satan-speed-and-sad-ism lyrics Perlman and Meltzer have dumped on them.

On the other hand, a glimmer of what the verbal pan of the B.O.C. concept might have been (if more humour had been allowed to creep in, as on 'Redeemed' from the first album) still lingers in the weird-me-baby titles - such as 'Mistress Of The Salmon Salt', 'Wings Wetted Down', 'Seven Screaming Diz-Busters' and, my personal favourite, 'O.D.d On Life Itself'. Where can you go after a title like that?

In general, the actual songs aren't as strong as those on Blue Oyster Cult. Instead of the occasional off-minor melody ('She's As Beautiful As A Foot') and cunningly-gauged contrasts of rhythm and attack (as on their best track, the great 'Before The Kiss, A Redcap'), we're faced with eight more or less epic feats of white-heat heaviness organised in brain-bursting arrangements designed to smash a "live" audience into submission.

On record these excercises in dynamics, velocity, and electroid ferocity tend to leave the listener aurally shaken, but emotionally unstirred.

For the defence, let it be said that Patti Smith's 'Baby Ice Dog' forms a pleasingly complex oasis of relief amidst a desert of barbaric, ear splitting simplicity; that the guitar duels between Buck Dharma and Eric Bloom are, in a totally unmusical way, highly spectacular and - on 'Diz Busters', which must be the fastest rock performance ever seared into smoking plastic grooves - techically pretty extraordinary; and that Gawlik's cover-art outdoes even the psychotic obsessionalism of the previous album in a geometrical tour-de-force of Cage-like monuments, unearthly symbols, and disembodied forests of periscopes in vistas of inky outer-space alienation.

Still, the point of it all remains moot.

Ingenuous Woodstockian idealism has become noisome, sure - but playing around at soulless diabolism for the sake of some freaked-out nostalgia for one of rock's most barren eras is, finally, pretty childish.

The only way The Blue Oyster Cult can redeem the gross tastelessness of their misbegotten de Sade-style assault on Virtue, is by being as stunning "live" as their reputation foretells.

But how can any mere human dance to something like 'Seven Screaming Diz-Busters'?

Here's hoping you get the implication.

Ian MacDonald || NME

Blue Oyster Cult: Secret Treaties (Columbia)

BLUE OYSTER CULT was formed with a very definite idea in mind, and they haven't deviated from or enlarged that idea much in two years. For that reason, their music has become progressively less interesting to me, although on a certain level it has become refined to a razor's edge of perfection.

This is group whose appeal is primarily intellectual, at least on record. They're sustained themselves on a live basis by providing the kind of high energy boogie raves the masses require, but their songs in essence are purposely obscure. As a result, they are known mainly for the distinctive, recognizable riffs on which the songs are built, rather than their content.

The concept of their music is extremely provocative at first, and a powerful impact was made critically by their debut album, which revealed a new world of unknown forces, with intriguing possibilities. The Doors had hit the same way but where they tapped the mysterious depths of the id and emotional excess, BOC applies the same treatment to the cerebral side of the mind, exploring the deviations and perversions of the intellect.

Musically and lyrically, they constructed a repelling universe of cold, heartless terror, forbidding technological perfection, and powerless victims at the mercy of inhuman powers. It was effective, and different enough to arouse some interest, but subsequent recordings have persisted too much in the same vein to keep any but the hard core S&M crowd excited.

I'm happy to report that this album marks the first sign of change. The dead seriousness of their early efforts has softened to allow recognition of the inherent absurdity of it all; in literary terms, their orientation is shifting from Frantz Kafka to Marvel Comics. This is, in a bizarre sort of way, a very humorous album. 'Dominance and Submission', for instance, while played straight-faced all the way, has a corniness that could only have been intentional. "Dominance!" hisses the left speaker. "Submission!!" shrieks the right. It reminds me of side two of Kim Fowley's 1968 album, Outrageous. In the same song, by the way, there's a guitar riff lifted from the Markett's 'Outer Limits'. Sure, they're serious.

Drama has become a subtle melodrama, mere technology has been elevated to meaningless banks of fake computers ala Star Trek; in short the whole thing displays a very slight but unmistakable tongue-in-check approach. Not self-parody, more the type of self-awareness that prevents music from becoming obsolete, the way all those 1968 groups who took themselves so seriously did.

The element of humor, while significant, is applied as cerebrally as anything else they've done. Let's face it, a line like "let me be your surgeon, I'll pick your brain" is not exactly Cheech & Chong material. It's a welcome change for BOC, though, and the song it's from, 'Career of Evil', is one of my favorites. Its protagonist is a type we saw go down in defeat many times on Man From Uncle, that space age villain whose warped designs can be endlessly diverting. It's got one of those spooky, unforgettable chord changes BOC is famous for, as do 'Subhuman' and, another spinetingler, 'Cagey Cretins.'

Getting into riffs, which as I've noted are BOC's most accessible strong point, there are a couple on this album that prove beyond doubt the group's slightly less than sober intent. 'Astronomy', one of those Hawkwind-like 'Space Is Dark' sort of things, introduces a guitar part we've heard before, on Bowie's 'Panic in Detroit'. No mistake about it, fun is being poked. If you doubt, check 'Me 262', which seems on the surface to be a tribute to the New York Dolls. You must listen close to discern what's going on, unless you're aware in advance of how much BOC really despise the Dolls. Any way you look at it, to take a key line from 'Flaming Telepaths', the joke's on you. Don't laugh, though; just buy the album, and they'll get the message.

Greg Shaw || Phonograph Record

Blue Oyster Cult: Secret Treaties (Columbia)

Blue Oyster Cult is the definitive heavy metal psychosis. Their music is a merciless barrage of energy that forms around itself an ominous aura. Listening to the stuff is like experiencing a good horror flick. The dynamics are the same and, after it's over, oh yes, something begins lurking in the next room. This is no nice stuff. There's no free will or flowers and cheese in Blue Oyster Cult's realm. It's all ruthless rock 'n roll fascism.

SECRET TREATIES is the band's third album and it's probably their best. The epileptic frenzy of the second album, TYRANNY AND MUTATION, has been redirected into a rawer, less production-conscious drive. The result is a tough and threatening power that becomes physically exhausting as song leads into song without pause or relief. Absolutely deadly, wumpa-wumpa stuff. Deliciously oppressive.

SECRET TREATIES is the best mondo-creepo album within memory - that's the most important thing about it. Blue Oyster Cult has finally synthesized power-mad rock 'n' roll with subtle horror. A lot of groups - Black Sabbath, Alice Cooper, Genesis, Hawkwind and others - have tried to do the same thing, but they've all been only partially successful, 'cause they either come off pretentiously, or kinky, or off-the-wall or stupid. Something.

Blue Oyster Cult, also, was only partially successful until this album. Here, however, everything is just right - threatening riffs, dramatic changes, relentless drive, eerie vocals and Buck Dharma's succinct and energy-crazed guitar leads, the best in heavy metal rock 'n' roll. BOC's lyrics are sometimes as incomprehensible as those of Yes' Jon Anderson but that's not important. What's important are the Faustian deals, anguish, horror, degeneracy and hellish plots they hint at. Real Lovecraft type stuff. It's the understated lyrical intent and the over-stated musical power that make for the album's ominous stigma.

Every song here is a killer. "Astronomy," despite the title, is not some cosmic wheezer. It opens quite calmly with a quiet piano intro, then explodes into a supercharged drive. "Subhuman" features nifty guitar harmonies over a frenetic rhythm. "Dominance and Submission" typically goes through a number of changes each building to a climax and returning thunderingly to the rhythm riff. "ME 262," the story of a suicide air raid on London, is a blitzkrieg guitar attack culminating with sirens and exploding bombs.

Have respect for SECRET TREATIES; play it real loud. It's one of the finest heavy metal albums and a great piece of mondo creepo.

Crocus Behemoth || Scene Entertainment Weekly

Blue Oyster Cult May Be Running Out Of Steam

Imagine if you will a group who comes out with songs entitled "Screams," "Hot Rails to Hell," "Career of Evil," "Dominance and Submission," and so forth. Or whose first few album covers map out a bizarre, geometrical no-man's land that matches the music inside. Or whose organization will send inquiring parties their song lyrics in the form of computer printouts.

Such a group is the Blue Oyster Cult, dubbed by many as the kings of the heavy metal slag heap. Their first album is probably the premier American statement in the style. The second is more "restrained" and very melodic in spots. The third, "Secret Treaties," is less electrifying than the first two. BOC is still hot, but they may be running out of steam.

"ME 262" is the closest they get to real metal mania this time around. The mind is boggled by the distinct possibility that BOC copped that morse code vocal technique from the Easybeats' "Friday on my Mind."

"HARVESTER OF EYES" is another neat one, spiced with a spunky guitar hook. Rock writer Richard Meltzer, whose contributions to BOC's music and mystique have been considerable, composed the lyrics.

"Dominance and Submission" has the same chunka-chunka licks as "Hot Rails to Hell," though here they don't work as well. The insertion of a quote from "Outer Limits," an old instrumental hit, seems somehow related to the song's lyric content,

The rest, with the exception of the two fine melodies that close the album, is not particularly notable. At times they seem to be holding back, a foreboding tendency that threatens their once-strong position. While BOC can still burn as bright as the best of them, they may already be past the nova stage.

F. David Gnerre || University Daily

Blue Oyster Cult: "Secret Treaties" (Columbia KC 32858)

THE BLUE Oyster Cult shares certain traits with that other New York cult band, the Dolls: an appropriate image for the outpouring of urban (and seemingly bottomless) frustration, an offbeat sense of humor and an ability to rock with grandeur. Although they've been together as the Soft White Underbelly and then the Stalk Forrest group since the late Sixties, commercial success has come only with the adoption of a new name and a modified stance: from straight rock & roll to a heavy-metal band. The change in direction and subsequent success can be attributed in large part to non-member Sandy Pearlman, the group's lyricist, stylistic consultant, co-producer and longtime manager.

The heavy-metal connotation comes mainly from Pearlman's funny-fantastic lyrics and the vocals, which borrow the shrillness and exaggerated vibrato of lesser people like Black Sabbath and Uriah Heep — seemingly merely for the sake of genre classification.

Pearlman's lyrics are alternately concerned with the phantasmagoric modern myths most clearly envisioned by Marvel Comix illustrators, and with macho-military regalia, often associated with the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe. But whatever inspiration Pearlman's approach provides, the band transcends eccentric detail when it launches into various instrumental sections. Don Roeser (aka Buck Dharma) plays a dextrous and muscular guitar; no matter how astounding his lead lines are, they're never free-flight solos but rather the cutting edges of arrangements.

From the teamed virtuosity and forcefulness of such tracks as 'Astronomy' (which sounds like Cossack-rock), 'Career Of Evil' (with lyrics by poet Patti Smith) and 'Flaming Telepaths' (driven by Don Roeser's overpowering guitar line), Blue Oyster Cult shows signs of achieving a rock & roll hybrid comprised not only of heavy-metal elements but also of the 5-D Byrds and the Brian Jones-dominated Stones. The blend is further modulated by recurring bits from Alice Cooper's 'Ballad of Dwight Fry', and the 'Theme from Peter Gunn'. And there are other quotes from the Sixties, including the Beatles and Motown.

If you play Secret Treaties at high volume (and you should if you play it at all), you'll hear all these divergent pieces hurtling along together in tense but still very close formation. Proving that Blue Oyster Cult is at the very least a triumph of aerodynamics.

Bud Scoppa || Rolling Stone

Blue Oyster Cult: "Secret Treaties" (CBS 80103)

If Andy McKay is in search of Eddie Riff he might as well give up now - Blue Oyster Cult found him years ago. Yep, it's the "The Nuremburg Rally's Greatest Moments" from CBS's answer to the SS... well, that's if you take the Cult so seriously. Y'see they put this menacing image of being Gestapoids and play real evil music but I've heard stories that during warm ups they do numbers like "Hang On Sloopy" and that they're old session pros. Well you can't believe everything you hear, but this album makes me wonder how long this band are going to last. If they're supposed to be America's answer to Black Sabbath they might as well give up. It's good meaty stuff but the overall effect is bland and uninspiring and this certainly doesn't match up to standard of their first two releases. The best tracks are "Career Of Evil" and the rather odd "Flaming Telepaths". I'm not really knocked out with the guitar playing provided by Donald (Buck Dharma) Roeser and Eric Bloom. Other tracks on the album are "Subhuman", "ME 262", "Cagey Cretins", "Harvester Of Eyes" and "Astronomy". I still think that Britain's got the stranglehold on heavy rock.

Pete Makowski || Sounds

Blue Oyster Cult: Secret Treaties (Columbia KC)

VIOLENT FANTASY, and the fantasy of violence - confrontation and aggression - present the logical ultimatum of warlike Christian civilizations: Imperial control of the means of personal production OR the chaos of anarchy - 'Dominance and Submission' - and beyond them, fear. And beyond fear? The science of Desdinova's experimental pact of starry wisdom between what the individual imagines is being accomplished and that which is real, and beyond reality, freedom. And beyond freedom? Deliverance.

But the absolute madness of Imperial terrorism as a principle of cosmic order, felt most strongly in the roadhouse boogie of BOC's 'Dominance and Submission', in the process, leaves nothing to the imagination except the final rage of suicidal impulse in 'ME 262', detailing the consummate indulgence of creative destruction in a non-creative setting. And except for the cleverly psychotic Morrison-warp ("it's so lonely in the state of Maine... don't bother comin' round my door") of R. Meltzer's 'Cagey Cretins', followed by the unbridled caginess of Meltzer's 'Harvester of Eyes' ("I'm the eyeman of TV/with my occular T-B/I need all the peepers I can find," apparently alluding to the ludicrousies of the Abe Fortas confirmation hearing, proximately learned from Pearlman), both the setup for the 'anthemoid' teen cynicism of 'Flaming Telepaths', the most important song on Secret Treaties, and perhaps the most important track BOC has ever committed to vinyl, already stronger than 'Cities On Flame' or Tyranny and Mutation's 'Hot Rails to Hell', stronger and more important as Eric Bloom sublimely begins ("opened up my veins too many times") and ends ("and the joke's on you... and the joke's on you!"; on the metal edge of transformation/resurrection, anti-climaxing at the origin of stars, 'Astronomy', mysticism bordering on atavism, the most 'overtly spiritual' track since 'Workshop of the Telescopes' (anti-'Redeemed'),destined to be the most anomically misread link since 'Quicklime Girl'. Who said it ain't easy?

The thread of accessibility running through the three albums is not only a result of the theme, manically preserved and unravelled with the icy regularity of Lucifer the light, entropically contracting (and expanding) the lives of Pearlman, Albert Bouchard, Meltzer, Eric Bloom, Don Roeser, Patti Smith (who wrote 'Career of Evil' with Bouchard before the Patty Hearst affair, yet notice the eerie consonance of events: "...and then I'd spend your ransom money, but still I'd keep your sheep"), and other non-members - Lovecraft, H.G. Wells, Baron von Undine (ultimately defeated Westphalian WWII Nazioid flying ace, hero of 'ME 262', a true lizard) Poe, Pynchon, and the entire shore population of Long Island between 1962 and 1974.

The clock strikes 12 twice for Desdinova's Secret Treaties: the first time is pre-cognitive, New Year's Eve 1963/64, Susie in the backseat shedding final pubescent scales - "can't you dig the locomotion kingdoms of the radio/45 RPM/too much revolution then" - howling to eternal repetition of 'Dominance and Submission'. The second is not much later, "where the four winds blow," where "the gin glows in the dark," where "tongues extend and then retract before the kiss: a redcap before the kiss," the summer of 1965/66, when the owner's boys go to work measuring patrons' thoughts too big for their skulls and the madman's reasons fly away, there is Desdinova ("eternal light") and "Astronomy - a star."

Quoth the retrograde religiosity of the ancients echoing from Gawlik's Luftwaffe Hall and Monument at Nuremberg: "Is it any wonder that my mind's on fire, imprisoned by the thought of what to do?/is it any wonder that my joke's an iron, and the joke's on you!" BOC evermore, evermore.

Arthur Levy || Zoo World

Blue Oyster Cult: Secret Treaties (Columbia)

Blue Oyster Cult had it hard from the very start. Their first album was a critical success and was one of the things that elevated metal to a 70s high art. But it illustrated a minor annoyance that parsed into Tyranny and Mutation, the band's tendancy to use musical deja vu as the starting point for something in their music that was distinctly their own. I strongly feared that people would buy the Cult's albums just to guess at which groups they were imitating/stealing from. The group would simply have to find a way to set their style in a changing framework if they were ever to become anything more than a musical novelty with little going for it except a dark vision.

Perhaps the Cult recognized this; their approach is so basically calculated. Their premier album was an attention-getter; the first side would hook you and gradually the second side would begin to take root. The second album was somewhat confusing in that it seemed, at the first, less heavy. This was due to the group's usage of the tricks they had learned from the moody, second side of the first album. Instead of the instruments playing regularly in unison, that approach began to be used for emphasis, and its replacement was a near jazzy use of shimmering keyboards and shifting guitar lines as a means to an end. It opened more avenues of escape and created a rather unique direction for a group who might have continued to make heavy, but boring albums. Secret Treaties is thus the biggest leap by the Blue Oyster Cult in a stylistic direction that bears a distinct signature.

Secret Treaties concentrates more on the macabre aspect of the group's material, but manages to rock in an albeit subtler way. "Dominance and Submission" is a tale of depravity expressed through dissonance and unpredictability. "ME 262" uses a conventional, near-Chuck Berry riff to point up the indirect hazards of being a young, Jewish lad obsessed with Nazism (the Cult have probably been having a lot of nasty calls from the JDL on this one). Although both "Career of Evil," with its sort of haunted house theme music, and "Cagey Cretins" with its familiar musical backdrop, rise above their beginnings.

The most striking thing about the whole album is that it sounds almost as if it had been made by an entirely different band. The starkly beautiful "Astronomy" and the soaring "Harvester of Eyes" explore directions that the first album only hinted at reaching and that's the secret. That's why you should be waiting for the next album as much as I am.. The surprises and the subtleties may make the Blue Oyster Cult the first group to go beyond heavy metal ever.

Lawrence Keenan || Creem

Blue Oyster Cult: On Your Feet Or On Your Knees

FIRST OF ALL let me tell you about the art work that John Berg has concocted for the Blue Oyster Cult's most extreme venture to date.

Front cover has an enormous embassy Cadillac parked, empty, in the driveway of a deserted New England church. B.O.C.'s logo is where a national flag would usually be.

Inside cover. All five members of the Cult are playing guitars on the altar and the pews are filled with the caped and cowled backs of the Klu Klux Klan, who else?

On the back a pair of unidentified black gloved hands hold open a Bible with the credits, titles and personnel replacing Moses or whatever.

The sky is pitch dark in all three shots.

On Your Feet Or On Your Knees. It's a double, three tracks a side, recorded during last autumn's all-American tour.

Parts of it qualify as the loudest, smartest, most sensational trip into essential rock 'n' roll excitement committed to vinyl.

So grab your rose and ringside seat and we'll start at the beginning.

'The Subhuman'. O.K. This stays as close to the studio cut as you could expect in live performance. Some fairly dull organ from Allen Lanier rescued by Donald "Buck Dharma" Roeser's atomic pickin', just to let you know that he's around.

Eric Bloom begins 'Harvester Of Eyes' with a synthesiser riff that sure ain't no improvement on the original, but solid Joe Bouchard's bass work saves the day in time for Eric to strap on his stun guitar and blast the living daylights out of the middle eight.

Dynamics on this are superb. Plenty of separation on the solos, menacing vocals and one of the Cult's more ludicrous flirtations with machismo sentiment.

'Hot Rails To Hell' harks back to Tyranny And Mutation, rougher and faster than before.

Bouchard copped every potential killer chord sequence that the likes of eariy Zep, Status Quo and Black Sabbath never got quite right, and turned in a real gem to prove that even bassists can write good songs.

Eminently unsuitable for those suffering from mental strain, heh, hen. I came prepared and still had to rest briefly after 18 minutes of sonic assault.

Side two, another hefty kick in the groin, commences with the crowd going bananas and more, genuine atmosphere than I've heard on a live album since The Doors' Absolutely Live.

B.O.C. go on to a stupendous rendition of 'The Red & The Black', their homage to the Mounties, which goes down particularly well in Vancouver.

At the end Bloom grabs the mike and mutters poignantly: "I'd like to thank my friends here who gave me this little whip. It's really lovely. Ill keep it and cherish it for ever." (Gullible cheers).

What distinguishes this band from the majority of heavies and second rate imitators is that amplification isn't used as a necessary escape to fall back on.

Part of their appeal is the noise, the desire to turn it up to breaking point, but sheer vol-ume doesn't compensate for intelligence and ideas, both of which they have in abundance.

Pearlman's boys are good enough to send up the hard-rock equals virility myth while producing some of the most exciting music since the Doors were functioning.

Mid-sixties influences become noticeably clearer when Dharma takes the spotlight. What he, and they, have done, is to distil controlled excess, mix it in with their customised comstockery and set off seem-ingly limitless reserves of flash.

East and West Coast styles credibly and inventively combined.

On 'Buck's Boogie' Roeser replays '67's guitar showcases and they become something new. He at least doesn't need to indulge in ego boosting guitar battles to establish his supremacy.

Buck's 'Last Days Of May', an' almost laid back contribution to the Blue Oyster Cult repertoire, provides a welcome degree of pacing. Very sticky and about as quiet as they'll ever get.

Drummer Albert Bouchard takes vocals on the Cult's original anthem 'Cities On Flame With Rock And Roll'.

His manic voice is even better than Bloom's at times and it's a pity they couldn't manage 'Dominance And Submission' live. They don't do it apparently because the drum part requires so much concentration that the vocals would suffer as a result. Never mind, this is equally powerful and just as fun. They take endless risks with the fake finales, but win hands down of course.

'M.E.262' isn't the tour de force we were promised. Bloom hams up the lead vocal too much and the harmonies are horribly flat, particularly at the end where they're also unintelligible.

The band kick over the instrumental traces a treat, though. Five guitars, set to destroy, play musical electric chairs at an energy level so intense it's unimpeachable.

Running order corresponds to that at an actual concert, so side four features the encores. 'Before The Kiss (A Redcap)' shows the band at their best.

Brilliant lyrics that unfold a drama of awful things. Eric's intonation excels:

While outside on the turnpike they've got this new hit tune, Thrills become as cheap as gas and gas as cheap as thrills.

The Brothers Bouchard lay down definitive hard-rock beat letting Lanier's rhythm do the muscle flexing. Again Dharma is the star of the show, tough right through and able to pull off masterful solos like other guitarists practise scales.

Finally there's 'I Ain't Got You (Maserati G.T.)' transformed from a modest rocker to an orgy of jackbooted aggression followed, incredibly, by a bone racking 'Born To Be Wild'.

It wouldn't be much exaggeration to say that this sounds like Vanilla Fudge, Steppenwolf and Iron Butterfly rolled into one. Yeah, I know that's a horrible thought, but it has got just about everything you'd expect from the ultimate violators of sanity.

The only thing that marred my enjoyment of On Your Feet is a sneaking suspicion that they're going to hang out of Europe yet again.

On this evidence Blue Oyster Cult have got all the credentials to keep their heavyweight title a very long time. It would be nice to see them for ourselves, just to make sure.

Max Bell || NME

Blue Oyster Cult: On Your Feet Or On Your Knees

THOUGH THIS record does not rank with the Beach Boys In Concert for sheer recording quality or the Who's Live at Leeds for spontaneous instrumentation, it does merit an armclaw as a thoughtfully conceived double live set. The Cult have delivered a wrenching assortment of stoner songs calculatingly cacophonic and executed in typically overblown manner.

It was a risktaker for the boys to put out a live two-disker for few recordings of this type (save for the aforementioned Beach Boys LP and a couple of others which now skip my mind) are rarely effective. On Your Feet Or On Your Knees is as efficiently debilitating as a brutal kick in the groin and stems primarily from the strong-but-sensible use of tri-guitars (most notably from Buck Dharma's viscious Gibson). The opening cut of the dirty dozen is the harmless 'Subhuman' (from Secret Treaties) with some Quicksilvery fretgrinding from Dharma but the riffriders then cut in savagely with 'Harvester of Eyes' (also from Treaties) and the group anthem 'Hot Rails To Hell' (off Tyranny and Mutation).

While the three-pronged guitarwork of Dharma, Eric Bloom, and Allan Lanier is the pitchpoint of Feet, thankfully they have not covered the vinyls with diarrhea six-string. The songs do tend towards the six-minute mark in length but stay away from the oh-so-awfully boring marathon electric solo. Rather, the Blue Oysters have mixed up their infecting melody lines with unhealthy doses of guitar trade-offs, caustic conglomerations of the three instruments, and rough but ready rhythm passages fueled by eighteen strings. 'Buck's Boogie' (oh Jeff, watch out) features guitar hyper-activeness (as well as bass, drum, and organ adrenal ramblings) but the riffs around which the solos are performed are engaging enough so as not to make the tune too terribly numbing.

'Born To Be Wild' and Clarence Carter's 'I Ain't Got You' are served up in gruntamental style though the former Mars Bonafire saga (he's now teaching karate) rambles for too long and in too many directions. According to Dharma, On Your Feet Or On Your Knees is an accurate portrayal of a BOC performance and should help to initiate those not already so with the traumatic thrashing of these New Yorkers. There's a lot of playing on this double-header and those ready for 70 minutes of primal phonographics should find it as satisfying as a gutsy belch. And for this morsel, you won't need Alka Seltzer.

Steven Rosen || Phonograph Record

On Your Feet Or On Your Knees - Blue Oyster Cult - Columbia PG 33371

Yep, those darlings of the quaalude and leather set have gone and recorded The Live Album. Not only that, it's a Double Album, just to make sure all Cult fans approach their product with the reverence that has been the band's semi-mythical due. Unfortunately, the brilliance of their last effort, Secret Treaties, is only to be occasionally found On Your Feet... The Cult have fallen back on their previous formula of uninspired and insipid plagiarism from the Stones, the Dead and Deep Purple.

Subject to one of the most effective press hypes in rock annals, the Cult have been touted as the The Next Big Thing, with little visible support from their company. Anyhow, On Your Feet... is certainly one of the best examples of vinyl carnage in some time. A single album would have been tolerable, as sides 3 and 4 are, in a tiresome way. A single, however, would've been a stroke of genius!

The hit could have been "Maserati GT". As heavy metal as the title, its lyrics fit the macho-mad individual who craves the thundering extension of his persona. Lead guitarist Don Rooser (who flatters himself with the Kerouac-Pynchon-like nom de guerre of Buck Dharma) gets off some raucous licks and turns the number around, first to a boogie, and then to a duet with drummer Al Bouchard. The transition to the apocalytic finish is tight as hell. Ending in an amplified grunt, "Maserati GT" would knock any AM radio of its shelf.

The flip to the hit could be Last Days of May. A dope smuggling ballad ending in (what else ?) death, Rooser s vocals and ringing axe blend as one with the band to display a skill in slow numbers rivalling very early Deep Purple.

So much for the way things might have been. Instead, the public has been handed a collection of excessive feedback, stolen licks and feeble leads. Secret Treaties has proven the band can master the genre. Here, the maudlin drum work, migraine inducing bass lines and pompous lyrics are the only memorables from On Your Feet...

Apparently, the Cult stand a better chance of combining forces behind Rooser in the studio. As for live shows ? Well, somewhere on the album a band member thanks the audience for the gift of a whip, as a token of esteem. Not a totally inappropriate gesture, but the donor forgot to include the dead horse.

Michael Jaworek || Daily Illini

Blue Oyster Cult — On Your Feet Or On Your Knees (Columbia)
Rating: one ear ["worth one listen at least"]

Lotsa really good-intentioned folks have been waiting impatiently for these Long island Oysters to put out a live recording.

Y'see, this, in reality, mild-mannered quintet, who masquerade at night as leather-jacketed super-machos in search of the perfect power riff, have a reputation as an absolute killer crash 'n thrash live band, and besides, they've got fast-hands Donald "Buck Dharma" Roeser on guitar and a bushel of some of the finest, most crazed para-intellectual lyrics in captivity.

However, they've also got a vocalist, Eric Bloom, who, besides being only a hair better than yer average screaming menacer, too often misses the mark (and the point, for that matter) with their outlandish verbiage on this two-LP set.

Plus there's an overall sound that sinks into basic, uninteresting sludge a bit too regularly here, so the balance sheet finds the scintillating moments promptly cancelled by the mediocre ones.

Yet there's still wildman Roeser, and he has to be the fastest, most inventive hard-rock guitarist about. The Roes saves more than one cut here with his sinuous-to-convoluted, machine-gunned solos that bend the outer limits of sonic boom rock.

A little more consistent help from his buddies would've made this album a real winner.

Yup, another almost.

Andy McKaie || Circus

Blue Oyster Cult: On Your Feet Or On Your Knees (Columbia)

THE BLUE OYSTER CULT have been heavy metal's premier studio musicians. Initially, they were an image manipulated, a persona directed by their producers, Murray Krugman and Sandy Pearlman. This was not necessarily a bad thing: into an already glutted market came a band with instant identity, even personality. But there was more than that.

The Blue Oyster Cult had the power of Black Sabbath without the merciless boredom, the hooks of Three Dog Night without the self-contempt. With guitarist Buck Dharma leading the attack, this band of wishful misfits could outplay anyone in their league. The sado-masochistic symbolism adorned with Nazi regalia mixed black humor with black leather which reached cosmic-comic proportions when one of the guys bumped into Werner Klemperer (Colonol Klink of Hogan's Heroes) and discovered they were cousins. It figures: nice Nazis make better entertainers than good Germans, because they're more sensitive to the contradictions.

But with Secret Treaties, it became clear that the Blue Oyster Cult was just following orders. It was a humorless record; like later Alice Cooper, the lyrics had descended to self-parody. The career of evil that had begun with the energy of Hitler at Munich, was now reduced to the flat beer insipidity of Dirk Bogarde in The Night Porter. The Blue Oyster Cult had a choice: on the stage or in the street.

If the BOC were merely the Tony Orlando and Dawn of heavy metal - that is, an attractive, marketable producer's vehicle - that would have been the end. But uber alles they are a formidable live rock 'n' roll band. Often, they're awesome, and aside from the concentration campiness ('I'd like to thank my friends who brought me this little whip here; I'll keep it and cherish it forever,' one of them says with Conrad Birdie affectation), they suffer from no personal energy crisis.

On Your Feet Or On Your Knees simulates a Blue Oyster Cult Concert, pieced together from half a dozen gigs. While on their studio albums the BOC tends to be a song band, each side of this 2-record set contains but three tunes, which means the main attraction here is the raved-up guitar frenzy of mostly familiar material. What's new? The definitive northern boogie instrumental, 'Buck's Boogie' and two oldies: 'I Ain't Got You' and 'Born To Be Wild', which by law of possession is probably now more the Blue Oyster Cult's than it is Steppenwolf's. If this album serves the purpose of being a pause before eventual revitalization (meaning more good songs) then its worth becomes obvious as both a document and as a tougher-than-dirt hard rock record. It is also possible, with Krugman and Pearlman producing other acts like Pavlov's Dog and the Dictators, that this is a stall. It just may be the redcap before the kiss, but the Cult have earned the benefit of the doubt.

Wayne Robins || Creem

Blue Oyster Cult: On Your Feet Or On Your Knees (Columbia 33371)

Can a nice Jewish boy from Eatons Neck, Long Island, find happiness as a satanic pop star decked out in full leather regalia? Can your better-than-average American rock band pawn itself off as an outfit of outlandish perverts on the make for kinky sex and violence? Especially when four of the five band members are sedate (and married) introverts?

Make no mistake about it: This band wants to come on menacing. After all, they have an image to live up to. Ever since rock-critic-turned-producer Sandy Pearlman cast the band as America's answer to Black Sabbath, the Cult has tread a thin line between no-nonsense hard rock and an ambiguously campy brand of heavy metal, pegged around mysterioso graphics and incendiary lyrics.

Yet their albums have never included a cover photo of the group because the reality of this band belies the image. In the concerts I've seen, that discrepancy hasn't mattered much, because the Cult can outplay such prototypical heavy-metal bands as Deep Purple. Moreover, they're not afraid to show their roots in person, by resurrecting such hoary classics as "Born to Be Wild" and "I Ain't Got You."

Blue Oyster Cult descend directly from such great psychedelic bands of the Sixties as Moby Grape and the Yardbirds. They excel at bristling, guitar-heavy ensembles, spearheaded by Donald (Buck Dharma) Roeser, a circumspect soloist who ranks with the hard-rock greats. After several years as Long Island's favorite local band, they attempted to land a national label, with no success. Finally they met Sandy Pearlman and Murray Krugman, who concocted the band's present personality, which on one memorable album, their first (Blue Oyster Cult), galvanized the music.

Subsequent efforts have not been so successful, however, as the producers have slowly run the Cultish conceit into the ground. While On Your Feet breaks the pattern by including such previously unrecorded Blue Oyster staples as "Born to Be Wild" and "Buck's Boogie," Roeser's instrumental showcase, the record also shrilly reasserts the band's public identity. "On your feet or on your knees," an emcee booms at several points during the two-record set; and, as if to remind you of their dark essence, the back cover and label depict an open book, presumably of occult secrets, held in leather gloves. On the older songs, lead singer Eric Bloom tries desperately to sound convincing as he hurries through the lyrics. He fails. (Singing has never been the group's strength in any case).

While rock & roll thrives on contrived personas, the best of it also partakes of a vital relationship between artist and audience. And that is precisely what's missing on these live sides. Peter Wolf of the J. Geils Band is no more a streetwise hustler than Eric Bloom is a devil worshipper, but Wolf's pose resonates with his own fantasies and those of his audience.

The lack of such resonance helps to explain why Blue Oyster Cult has remained stillborn, a critic's band, not flamboyant enough to travel the Kiss route of prefab theatricality, not credible enough to match the impact of J. Geils. Still, they're damn good rockers, as On Your Feet proves repeatedly. But when you can rock & roll, who needs leather gloves?

Jim Miller || Rolling Stone

Blue Oyster Cult: Agents Of Fortune (Columbia)

Blue Oyster Cult have never been a band for inspiring neutral opinions. They definitely are NOT something you put on in the background while studying or doing housework. One way or another, your attention is seized. And the resultant opinions of this band are similarly clear-cut. They are either the saviours of heavy metal rock or an overpublicized bane to that form for most listeners.

It's always been my view that BOC rests somewhere between those two extremes. They've offered material as good as power rock seems capable of being-blockbuster dynamics and musicianship deserving of all the critical acclaim it receives. But except for sections of their previous four albums (most of the fine first LP), BOC have never completely fulfilled either their fine potential or their hype. Bland songwriting and occasional over-calculation on the part of their mentors, Sandy Pearlman and Murray Krugman, can be heard in sections of the band's material. And an obsession with image and attitude hasn't quite worked the miracles it was projected to pull off, creating instead a fascist R&R machine in the minds of many.

AGENTS OF FORTUNE suffers from the inevitable problem of attempting to follow up a dynamic live record (ON YOUR FEET OR ON YOUR KNEES), and in that respect could have done much worse. The good definitely outweighs the bad, with parts that weigh exceptional. But, true to form, other parts aren't anything above pedestrian.

Krugman and Pearlman have slightly eased their once-iron grip on the Cult's direction. While still producing the band, the duo contribute lyrics to only two of this record's tracks. A new direct influence appears in the form of fellow New York rock extremist Patti Smith, who cowrote two songs with the current main man in her life, BOC drummer Al Bouchard. "The Revenge Of Vera Gemini" opens with a brief spoken jive from Patti, and her hand is clearly present in its directness and eerie undercurrent. Their other collaboration, "Debbie Denise," is more conventional, its broken-heart lyrical tone even taking on overtones of pop balladry.

Other high points of the LP are "Tattoo Vampire," with an opening chop-chopping rhythm heralding an aural locomotive chugging straight into the listener's brain, and "Sinful Love," similarly flat-out rocking with Buck Dharma again proving he is one of the best lead stylings around.

I was ready to like "This Ain't The Summer Of Love" for its title alone, but its Aerosmith-ish repetitive plodding let me down. Likewise, "E.T.I." grinds a few simple riffs to death, and proves once and for all that B.O.C. aren't any kind of space rock outfit.

When this band is "on," they produce some of the best metal music in the genre's history, but inconsistency has been a recurring, unexorcised demon. The Cult, their associates and their record company have always held lofty hopes for massive success, but the group's highpowered image and hook logo can fall into the graveyard of rock trivia if placed before the music. The latter still rests on the verge of greatness, but AGENTS OF FORTUNE should earn them at least one more shot at the overwhelming LP they've always hinted at.

Cliff Michalski || Scene Entertainment Weekly

Blue Oyster Cult: Agents Of Fortune

NO MATTER HOW predictable rock seems to become, it can still surprise you, and I've got to admit to being surprised as hell by the Blue Oyster Cult.

Of all the groups most likely to come up with a contemporary classic, they were pretty low on my list. They'd made one energetic but unexceptional live ablum and three studio LP's which sounded tortuous and cumbersome to me, as if they had a hundred riffs in their heads and felt compelled to use twelve of them in each song. Figuring in the endless posturing of their live sets and the reams of pompous inanity generated by their journalistic supporters, the total score for me was on the negative side.

But the Cult really came through with a classic on Agents Of Fortune, and I can't hear enough of it. It's called 'Don't Fear The Reaper', it was written by guitarist Donald Roeser, and it's impossibly good. It's built around a simple, insistent guitar riff guaranteed to mesmerize all but the dullest of dullards, with a captivating minor-chord melody plus haunting harmonies and vocal interplay the likes of which BOC have never before approached. Great drumming, lyrical lead guitar, and neat philosophical lyrics that don't get in the way but are there if you want them. The only flaw is a disconcerting, slightly atonal segment midway through which should be edited out when Columbia issues the track as a single (as I'm assured they will). It will either be a huge hit or a treasured collector's item and Cult favorite in ten years' time, but right now it's up there with the very best American rock of the 70's, records like 'I Wanna Be With You' by the Raspberries, 'Search & Destroy' by the Stooges, Big Star's 'September Gurls', Grin's 'Moontears', and both Dwight Twilley Band singles.

'Don't Fear The Reaper' is so good that the rest of the album necessarily pales, which is as it should be, since half of it is the same old lumbering riff-rock and deserves to be forgotten. But the Cult are using vocal harmonies more, and it helps on cuts like 'E.T.I.' Both of Patti Smith's collaborations with drummer Albert Bouchard are intriguing, especially the uncharacteristic (for BOC) teenage lament 'Debbie Denise'; and there's a snappy pessimistic rocker called 'This Ain't The Summer Of Love' (great title), co-written by Back Door Man staffer Doc Savage.

Overall Agents Of Fortune sounds like one of the better Blue Oyster Cult albums. But the LP (or alternatively, the forthcoming single) is a must purchase for 'Don't Fear The Reaper', which even if it is (as I suspect) a once-in-a-career happenstance has won me over to the BOC cause. It's simply the best single track I've heard all year.

Ken Barnes || Phonograph Record

Oysters Swamped By Unchained Superlatives
The Blue Oyster Cult: Agents Of Fortune (Columbia-Import)

I guess I'll have to lay my cards down and say I always felt the Cult would produce a no-holds-barred stone masterwork befitting a band of individuals so obviously attuned to the spirit of the genre. "Agents Of Fortune" is the album in question.

After last summer's European jaunt which resulted in previous advocates withdrawing their favours somewhat, much talk of lame stage act, failed evil aura - you remember - I waited apprehensively for the rebuttal from the East Coast's only begotten sons of dizbuster acid rock into the here and now.

They are vindicated without apologies.

Perhaps the criticisms levelled at Pearlman's troops was justified. I thought much of the sniping was at least constructive; so did they to the extent that at the second Hammersmith Odeon riot they'd removed the drum solo, cut the extraneous crowd-pleasing crap and concentrated on arching the hall with their battery of musical-cum lyrical genius.

It comes to mind that there are only a handful of bands merging the relevant influences of the last decade with the potential that increased sophistication in terms of instrumentation, volume, production mono makes feasible; on my turntable The Cult are more adept at keeping one clawed boot in the '60s while the other paw scrapes away at the dark core of today than any comparable outfit.

Their first monster set the scene and outlined the persona that "Tyranny And Mutation" turned into BOC's thumbprint. The glove was down but there was no competition. "Secret Treaties" followed as '74's sole legit H.M. classic (when another so called contender for the wreath dreams up a song as irresistibly mind boggling as "Dominance And Submission" come back and tell me).

The live album, which in retrospect is patchy, contained evidence at its best of the Cult's manic soft white underbelly and their fearsome reputation as purveyors of the meanest, literally frightening dosage available in vinyl format.

With "Agents Of Fortune", unbelievably, they transcend its predecessors. A solid blow to all those with wool in their ears sprouting off on the death knoll of rock 'n' roll, either too unenlightened or culpably refusing to listen to the surfeit of superb music nestling under their noses in 1976.

The matter at hand. Without wishing to destroy your sense of discovery too much I'll fill you in on the cover art work, something they always take care of with unequalled panache.

Out front a gent in evening dress card sharps four artefacts from the tarot pack that all bear on the inner material (recorded). Behind Lynn Curlee's painting the spheres revolve, controlled by this ambiguous agent. I'll leave the rest to your eager purchase and vivid imagination.

The harvest is immediately reaped on "This Ain't The Summer Of Love", which is the Cult recovering all angles in their changing moods of panic, cynicism and ultimate rock truth Eric Bloom handles the vocal with his customary nastiness: "Feeling easy on the outside, not so funny on the inside. Hear the sound pray for rain, 'cos this is the night we ride. This ain't the Garden of Eden, there ain't no angels above, and things ain't what they're supposed to be, and this ain't the summer of love."

The song is distinctly moody - as in unpleasant. Donald (Buck Dharma) Roeser stalks off on a mesmerising guitar volley the equal of any of his own previous creations. At just 2.20 minutes this would make one hell of a single - incongruous maybe, but heavy in the unadulterated sense of the word.

Finally Allan Lanier makes his singing debut with a solo composition I first heard at the four-track stage in a London hotel room late last autumn. To mark the occasion Columbia have spelt his name right on the cover.

The number, "True Confessions", is presumably about strained relationships a la the boy and girl school, particularly with both Lanier and Patti Smith being on the road almost permanently. Can't think why they've kept Lanier's writing and singing talents under wraps for so long because this is a further addition to the Cult's stream of self-contained vignettes - without actually bearing too much on the overall direction of the album.

The Brecker Brothers' searing saxes tear off the piano motif while the incomparable Bouchard rhythm section drips alongside.

Just why these boys are so patiently manufacturing to a standard far removed from normal excellence is amply indicated on "(Don't Fear) The Reaper", a Roeser classic that will stand against previous examples of inspiration such as "Astronomy" and "The Last Days Of May." It's the longest cut on the album of unusually short songs but although the melody is beautifully to the point of hummable the number is pure muscle; no fatty tissue.

Of all the acceptable heavy exponents the Cult seems more likely to uncover a chord structure of this magnificence, and only Dharma could sing it with the appropriate delicacy.

Under the hypnotic guitar line Albert Bouchard and Bloom weave a subtle percussive off beat that tantalises until the vocal creeps insiduously in. The second chorus begins: "Romeo and Juliet are together in eternity," the harmony accompanying is pure magic, just like Michael and The Messengers in fact.

Thereafter the Cult do not look back.

"E.T.I. (Extra Terrestrial Intelligence)" is outrageous. The Sandy Pearlman and Roeser team have here written chaos many times before and this kick in the face joins the ranks at the top. Synthesised voice guitar that destroys anything Joe Walsh or Jeff Beck have ever mangled out of said gadget, then the Rock King of the Finger Lakes spitting out the "Agents Of Fortune", Balthazar, epic grande.

Lyrically it's prime obscure Cult. Must be one of the Desdanova cycle that they've traced throughout their existance. Buck's front line attack surpasses "Hot Rails" and the rhythm support is not to be tampered with.

Two points here. Firstly, I think "E.T.I." may be one of BOC'S projected inclusions of the "Fire Of Unknown Origin/Mirror Of Illusion" project which Bouchard and Pearlman have been formulating as their coup de theatre. From what I heard last summer this will be an achievement on the level of Brian Wilson's lost "Smile" tapes. Hope it doesn't go the same way.

Secondly, this is the only song on the album composed by Pearlman. Whether this is politics or just the way it happened I don't know. I do know that Pearlman and Cult are synonymous and that's how they must keep it for maximum effect.

Conjecture aside, the lead break is severely demonic, a cities aflame blaze.

Both sides are arranged in total symnetry, two shortish songs build into the middle which in each case is the weightiest number lengthwise, then two more balanced finales arranged as penultimate movement and crescendo.

The block-buster on side one is Patti Smith's and Albert Bouchard's "The Revenge Of Vera Gemini." Now Patti at the Roundhouse was a revelation, but I've always felt that "Career Of Evil" and "Baby Ice Dog" were the best things she ever wrote. And this joins them.

It's a male/female dance duet and absolutely in the footsteps of James Douglas Morrison: "You are boned like a snake with the consciousness of a snake."

If I could describe the effect this will have on you (which I can't) then suffice to say it comes over like Shocking Blue locked in the next dimension. Ms. Smith even sings in tune, and for fans of her debut record there's a clue as to her future: "No more horses, horses, we're gonna swim like a fish". Dharma peels off kerosene-doused licks and the ending resolves into deathly hush.

Side two opens with a couple of Bouchard and H. Robbins compositions, "Sinful Love" and "Tattoo Vampire" which are both archetypal fantasy domain Cult, totally bizarre, straightforward streamrolling lunacy. Keep a close friend near at all times, especially for "Tattoo Vampire" 'cos it kicks off like a pack of skinned bats.

Quiet man of the band, Joe "The Bass" Bouchard, sings the medial cut, "Morning Final", a murder on the subway with full grisly sound effects. Lanier's organ and piano work is remiscent of early Ray Manzarek, a double-edged knife consistency so dense it'll turn your emotions onto full tap.

This finishes with a hell bound train grinding to a screech upon which the doors open to reveal "Tenderloin".

Now I expect The Cult to be different at all times but "Tenderloin" is a real departure. It's another Allen Lanier ouvre. Bloom's phrasing and the jazz blue note treatment is new ground: "I come to you in a blue, blue robe" and "I'm feeling hungry have another line" highlight Eric's chilling delivery, the style I thought had reached fruition on "Secret Treaties" taken to a completely alternative conclusion. The keyboard on the third verse is masterful. On the other hand the closer, "Debbie Denise," a Patti Smith poem from the "Witt" collection, is inexplicable. Bouchard produces a melodic melange so basically alien to the BOC image I'm not sure how they get away with it, but they do.

Getting down to the grits I'd call it a combination of Four Seasons counter part harmony rooted in the warm outerworld of vigilante tomboy Lesbian ballad with neo-Beach Boys bad vibration synthesisers to ice off the whole mixture. (Max!!!-Ed)

Bearing in mind that the lyrics are an adaption of a woman-to-woman situation, when you hear Albert sing "I'd come here with my hair hanging down and she'd pin it up and softly smile. And I was rolling with my man" it becomes apparent that it takes these guys to carry off the near-maudlin and make it tasteful. The number is branded classic.

Listen, it's no hyper-critical bullshit to say that "Agents Of Fortune" will elevate this band to the ranks reserved for the pioneers. BOC don't plagiarise for their ideas but they have the mystique and menace peculiar to vintage American rockers. When all is said and done this is the Cult at their best. Buy it, turn it on loud and work it out. I haven't come down yet.

Max Bell || NME

Blue Oyster Cult: Agents Of Fortune (CBS S 81385)

There's a fortune in Oysters sez seafood-crazy G. Barton, the kid with the plutonium-lined skull.

Saddens me, when a US band comes across to tour Britain at great expense, with no hope of making any money, and attracts audiences that seem to almost will them to fail so that they can go home to their friends and proclaim "they blew it!" and gloat evilly. This happened with Kiss recently, who put on a magnificent show, yet were scorned; Blue Oyster Cult faced exactly the same situation, in London at least, last year.

OK, so BOC were disappointing in that their show was rather tacky, the drum solo (parody or not) was dumb and the 'Dominance And Submission' image didn't come across - how could it with the diminutive, fresh-faced Donald "Buck Dharma" Roeser fronting them? But did they deserve a fierce critical backlash and the disdain, contempt even, of several hundred fans? I think not.

Obviously, it's difficult for States bands to live up to the reputations which have preceded them, mostly by word of mouth, across the Atlantic. But if nothing else we must be grateful for the fact that they do visit Britain, something of a backwater country that it now is, and that they do endeavour to put on acts as close to their American shows as possible.

That said, it was necessary for the Cult to come up with a prime new album this time around, one that would restore a somewhat flagging reputation. Agents Of Fortune does it - one-time aficionados should return to the BOC fold in their droves, trufans will be delighted, converts will be many. It's very good indeed.

Three points to note, first of all: there are all of 10 songs, all short (the longest is 5.05) succinct and to the point; Sandy Pearlman and Murray Krugman are only credited with one number each - allowing Allan Lanier (often with the help of girl friend Patti Smith) to chip in with two numbers, 'True Confessions' and 'Tenderloin', both excellent; but, most importantly, AOF is endearingly low-key, straight ahead, Top 40 even. And you can hear the words.

Cult trademarks abound, of course - lyrics are bizarre, Roeser licks are as liquid, spine-juggling as ever, a feeling of unease is always just over the horizon.

But, in a way, AOF is more insidious than any of the band's previous albums. BOC always try to get their own devious, macabre messages across - and what better way to do it than by sounding wide-eyed and innocent?

The first three tracks of the album provide ample evidence of this: 'This Ain't The Summer Of Love' (an air of cynicism pervades the track, Jonh Ingham calls it "the 'White Rabbit' of 1976," but it's undeniably good-time), 'True Confessions' (very tongue-in-cheek) and the superb Roeser composition '(Don't Fear) The 'Reaper'. This one's extremely restrained, very drift-along, with mellifluous vocals in a Simon and Garfunkel, Turtles (even) vein.

Other tracks are 'E.T.I. (Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence)', the single Pearlman track and part-composed by the man at that (has he become bored with his creation?); 'The Revenge Of Vera Gemini', by Allan Lanier and Patti Smith, featuring the latter on breathy backup vocals; 'Sinful Love'; 'Tatoo Vampire', with a manic 'rha-rha-rha-rha' drum - ? - opening; 'Morning Final', telling the tale of a killing on the subway; and a very basic, almost balladic, Spector-like closer, 'Debbie Denise', which was apparently originally a Patti Smith poem.

Agents Of Fortune does it. You can dance to it, even.

Geoff Barton || Sounds

BLUE OYSTER CULT: "Agents Of Fortune" (CBS Import PC 34164).

Eric Bloom (vocals, guitar, keyboards, percussion); Albert Bouchard (drums, vocals, acoustic guitar, percussion, harmonica); Donald (Buck Dharma) Roeser (guitar, vocals, synthesizer, percussion); Joe Bouchard (bass, vocals, piano); Allen Lanier (keyboards, vocals, guitar, bass). With: Patti Smith (vocals) and Michael and Randy Brecker (horns). Produced at the Record Plant, New York, by Murray Krugman, Sandy Pearlman and David Lucas.

If the presence of a Certain Name among those credits is already bringing you out in a cold sweat and reaching immediately for a bottle of Wild Turkey - worry no more. Patti Smith is OK with Blue Oyster Cult freaks.

Whatever her past sins, Patti's contribution to "Agents Of Fortune," the Cult's fifth album is minimal in content and to maximum effect. You can hear her on only one cut, "The Revenge Of Vera Gemini," which has to be the stand-out of the album. Patti mutters a couple of lines of poetry then in come the lads with one of their unbeatable bass-led rifts, fleshed out with twangs of guitar and weird stabs of synthesizer.

With the bit between their teeth, there's no way Ms. Smith can regain the advantage, and thereafter sne confined back-Up vocals - and her flat, deathly phrasing adds immeasurably to the mysticism of the number. It pounds along at a relentless pace and, if so issued, could give the band their first hit single - for Chrissake, you can even dance to it. (Oh, and if the presence of the Brecker Brothers gives you the impression that this might be the first heavy metal disco album, forget it - they hardly figure in the action at all.

But less of the guests; what of the stars of the show? "Agents Of Fortune" is the Cult's best album to date, capping even their magnificent live double, "On Your Feet Or On On Your Knees." It also sees them make the break from heavy metal into straight rock (as one MM wit asked, "is this their acoustic album?"). They've found the confidence to come out from behind the riffs: perfectly honed vocal harmonies, immaculate guitar solos and solid musicianship arise from the mix like a phoenix from the ashes. Yet they've not forgotten that one essential of metal: the drive and urgency that makes the style one of the most inherently exciting in rock. They ladle it out in generous portions on their softer numbers to compensate for the loss of instrumental power; thus "Don't Fear The Reaper," a ballad, really, with beautifully laidback harmony vocals, has the drive of an express train from the rhythm section, while the following track, ETI (Extra Terrestrial Intelligence)," a heavy rock song with screaming guitars et al, is taken at a much more restrained rate.

You'll have noticed, no doubt, from the titles mentioned that though the Cult may have adjusted musical policy, their musical policy, they've lost none of their talent for eerie, catchy titles. An added bonus is that the "new" Cult's lyrics can be heard clearly for the first time. "Tattoo Vampire," for example, is littered with grisly imagery; "Morning Final" is a moving tale of a subway slaying; "True Confessions" is almost satirical comment on yellow journalism. But it's nigh-on impossible to pick out the exceptional on such a magnificent album, brimful of ideas and fresh approaches, both lyrically and musically.

If you've been put off in the past by the prospect of having your ears blasted out by Cult's metal meanness, or were, like me, profoundly disappointed by their recent British live shows, then forget your preconceptions and splash out on "Agents of Fortune"; very few Of bands today can match its quality. And Patti Smith will never make a better album.

Mike Oldfield || Melody Maker

BLUE OYSTER CULT: "Agents Of Fortune" (CBS Import PC 34164)

"Agents of Fortune" is a startingly excellent album - startling because one does not expect Blue Oyster Cult to sound like this; loud but calm, manic, but confident, melodic but rocking. Every song on the first side is commercially accessible without compromising the band's malevolent stance.

One area of clear improvement is in the matter of lyrics; for the first time there is less emphasis on absurd, crypto-intellectual rambling and more of a coherent attack on a variety of subjects. The former had become simply tiresome; the latter opens up whole new areas for Cult investigation. "This Ain't the Summer of Love, for example, is a fresh approach to a subject one would expect to have been exhausted long ago.

The Cult is still loud ("Tattoo Vampire"), still mordant ("(Don't Fear) the Reaper"), still obsessed with their peculiar brand of beery mysticism ("ETI (Extra Terrestrial Intelligence)"). But by dropping the SaM angle and by inserting slivers of genuine rock & roll like "True Confessions," their best song ever, the Cult is easing into maturity with integrity. "Agents of Fortune's" comparative slickness even serves to enhance their dark image: the ominous villainy conveyed by Buck Dharma's agile guitar lines on "Tenderloin" is far more effective than his heretofore standard thudding meanness.

Blue Oyster Cult has built its career on a series of nonsequiturs. Initially, these took the form of a group image of fascist hoodiness and "ugly" music detailed by AWOL rock critics wordplay. This time, it is Patti Smith's presence, co-writer of "Debbie Denise" and "The Revenge of Vera Gemini," that provides the Cult with the aleatory motivation to seek success in the burgeoning commercial punk rock sweepstakes. Another central influence is Allen Lanier's increasing importance, here evidenced by his authorship of "True Confessions" and "Morning Final," an ambitious bomb.

In fact, former major-domos Sandy Pearlman and Murray Krugman seem to be barely keeping the boys in line, let alone under their aesthetic thumbs. Or maybe thats just what they want us to think, since with David Lucas, they are credited with producing the record. In any event, "Agents of Fortune" is a very pleasent surprise, its first side contains some of the best rock released thus far this year.

Ken Tucker || Rolling Stone

Blue Oyster Cult: Agents Of Fortune (Columbia)

BOC: Any Old Way They Choose It
After last year's virtually unredeemable double live LP set, On Your Feet or On Your Knees, it seemed that the Blue Oyster Cult had reached the point where all they were doing was beating a dead Jew Live albums by moderately successful bands striving to be highly successful ones are often a good ploy (we refer you to Kiss, Peter Frampton etc., probably Aerosmith soon - though it'll only be icing on the cake for them), but it doesn't always work out. Since the Cult had, by Secret Treaties, almost totally divorced themselves from their original conception as spelled out on their debut LP, this occurring mostly via Tyranny and Mutation, where they waxed monolithic to try and become the only heavy band on the planet with some intentional sense of overriding intelligence, the only excuse for the live album was to bring those as yet uninitiated with the band's material around in one fell swoop. But that really didn't, happen to any significant extent, so here was a group who'd started out with any direction viable but chose to follow only one fork of their eclectic roads. And they damned near ruined themselves in the process - too many bombing missions over already devastated territory.

What obviously happened in the last year is that Blue Oyster Cult took a fairly hard look at itself and Agents of Fortune, the result of the meeting in the huddle, is almost like a second first album. There is no juggernaut comin' down the block to bulldoze you into submission. Instead it's five guys in a band that is killer on quite a few different levels. If the sound is a bit disjointed from track to track (the only real anchors here are Eric Bloom's wolf in wolf's clothing voice and Buck Dharma's dynamic tension guitar breaks), it's because there are actually personalities showing through, and yes, even traces of humanity. (Die-hards need not be alarmed though; there's still plenty of death and destruction abounding lyrically - it's just that instead of World War II and outer space, the tendency is towards more contemporary and relatable settings.)

So that "Summer of Love," penned by BOC producer Murray Krugman, ("This ain't the Garden of Eden / there ain't no angels above / and things ain't what they used to be--and this ain't the summer of love"), functions right at the start of the album as the ultimate self-parody, an AM, hummable "Transmaniacon MC." It's followed immediately by "True Confessions," written and sung by Alan (or Allan or Allen, depending on which album jacket you Relieve) Lanier and what strikes you most is not that it sounds very different from anything you've heard from the band before, what with its straight ahead raunchy rock 'n' roll no frills approach, (pumpin' piano, dynamite rhythm guitar, even a sax) but the fact that it's a goddamn great song. Neat Stonesy vocal by A. and it's his first lead singing assignment ever with the band, which means we've been missing a lot and we better get more.

As if "True Confessions" isn't left fieldish enough, Buck Dharma's "Don't Fear the Reaper," a solid bite of late '60s Angloid via Byrds harmonies grafted onto musing re the philosophy of death, complete with spectacular storm after calm guitar frenzy, carries things even more upwards and outwards. "ETI," with Eric singing, brings things back to familiar unfriendly skies and the side closes with an aquatic boogie shuffle called "The Revenge of Vera Gemini," as Albert Bouchard and guest star Patti Smith battle for speaker control in a sump outside Amityville, L.I.

Side two is highlighted by new lyric contributor Helen Robbins' two gems, the murky "Sinful Love" and the bone sawing "Tattoo Vampire" Eric chips in with a fine performance on Lanier's "Tenderloin," and the record ends with Patti's "Debbie Denise," an actual ballad with Albert falsettoing it up beautifully. Agents of Fortune is as good as it was unexpected and while it may not be the best record Blue Oyster Cult has ever done, still, coming as it does at such a critical point in the band's lifespan, it may be their most important one.

Billy Altman || Creem

Blue Oyster Cult: Agents Of Fortune

The Cult, for years the ultimate heavy metal band, darling of the leather-jacket-and-chains-bikers, has come up with the musical masterpiece of the 70's. No album stands up to AGENTS OF FORTUNE. Previous Cult albums were relatively narrow in scope compared to the universal approach to musical idiom on the new LP. ON YOUR FEET OR ON YOUR KNEES and TYRANNY AND MUTATION were great albums, but AGENTS has the capacity to engulf the world in its intricately woven musical web.

Opening with a typical negative teenage fascist anthem "This Ain't The Summer of Love," the Cult surges right into a heavy metal signature, counterposing exquisite complex musical patterns against a pessimistic, lyrically threatening vocal barrage.

The second cut, Alan Lanier's vocal debut, is what the Stones should sound like now. It is followed by the B.O.C.'s first single hit, "(Don't Fear) The Reaper," written and, sung by the world's foremost rock guitarist, Buck Dharma. "Reaper," which is the first Cult song to get heavy play in S.F. bars, is as melodic and . . . m.o.r. as anything in Top Ten radio - where it will no doubt soon be - and, yet, is still uncompromisingly masterful rock 'n' roll. The Byrds never quite pulled something like this off, although "Eight Miles High" was an early prelude to "Reaper."

The next song, "E.T.I." (Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) takes the Cult even higher, as improbably as that seems. The ultimate in heavy metal, "E.T.I." soars to the outer limits of the galaxy. The Cult employed Patti Smith to re-stabilize listeners with the closing of the first side 1. Together with Albert Bouchard, Patti wrote and performed "Revenge of Vera Gemini," a rhythmnically penetrating celebration of sensual rock music.

Side 2, hard-pressed to keep up the shattering momentum of the first side, retreats into well-practiced Cult excellence with "Sinful Love," a prototypical Doors song, and "Tenderloin," Lanier's second cut, standing out in musical halos of perfection.

The Blue Oyster Cult is Columbia Records contribution to the evolution of (human) civilization, It's a great album.

H. Klein || Bay Area Reporter

Agents of Fortune — Blue Oyster Cult (Columbia)

Most thrilling heavy-metal events of the year thus far:

1) the Dictators' triumphant comeback;
2) hanging out while the 'Tators and Blue Oyster Cult rehearsed in Port Chester's Capitol Theatre this spring, the atmosphere indoors ablistering with new blood and Marshall amp feedback;
3) hearing Blue Oyster Cult's brand-newest doozy of galvanized rockmanship on vinyl, Agents of Fortune.

True to image, each Cultster appears in black tie 'n' tails in a color photo on the inside elpee cover. They are assembled 'round a roulette wheel atop a lunar surface, placing bets with BOC-emblemified chips. On the front cover, a dapper, sorta wooden-looking gent, also in stage magician drag, displays four symbolically jam-packed Tarot cards: Death, L'Imperatrice (the Empress), L'Empereur (the Emperor), L'Etoile (the Star).

Several possible — although unorthodox — interpretations of the hand: Are Blue Oyster Cult destined for bigger and better things only to have hopes dashed by splitting up as a group, getting married, becoming rulers of an empire? Are Blue Oyster Cult intent on "going Vegas"? If and when the chips are down, does their music decline? Furthermore, how possible is it for a group to progress on record if they can't get off the road?

Agents of Fortune more than satisfies my native inquisitiveness /anxiety. Sublimely. Astounding album, despite in-group obstacles like constant touring and piddling mass recognition when compared with that of turkeys like Deep Purple and Uriah Heep. The difference between Purple or Heep and BOC is the difference between Tijuana Smalls and Sherman's Cigarettellos: style and taste.

Sexy, intelligent, menacing in a tuff-guy-bluff vein, this elpee also relies on softer wiles without sacrificing the Savage power and drive that begat Blue Oyster Cult their cranium-bludgeoning appeal. Besides "heavy" cuts like "Tattoo Vampire," "E.T.I.," and "This Ain't Summer of Love" (an undeniable, Top 20, chartbustin' contender), BOC revels in basic, wicked, honky-tonk-type rock: lotsa hot drummin, keyboards, and witty lead-axe riffs. Especially grabby are "Sinful Love" and "True Confessions," written and wailed by Alan Lanier who sings: "We're never sorry, we're never sad/We're modern lovers — what fun we have."

It's a chilling, masterfuly produced humdinger, like the entire album. Passionate brass-tacks rock & roll. (Better'n Kiss!)

Trixie A. Balm || Circus

Blue Oyster Cult: Agents Of Fortune - Columbia (PC 34164)

It's back-to-the-roots for the Oysters this time; the roots being the band's late-'60s incarnation as the Stalk-Forrest Group. Which is to say, Agents Of Fortune - intensely melodic, laced with icy Frisco guitar leads - resembles S-FG's unreleased Elektra album of years back. Scary is still beautiful but Agents manages to toss some hefty lyrical ballast into the raging metal torrent that has long been BOC's stock in trade.

Conventional Cultists will still find plenty to nosh on here; as one might suspect, 'Tattoo Vampire' and 'This Ain't The Summer Of Love' cut hard and deep. Tracks like 'E.T.I.', however, suggest the ideal synthesis between cold steel and sweet harmony the band has seemed to be seeking since Secret Treaties. If its Fleetwood Mac + 'Kinky Reggae' chops render 'Tenderloin' only moderately spooky, if 'Revenge Of Vera Gemini' (with guest vocalist Patti Smith) runs a little slow, Agents' bright spots qualify the album as a BOC milestone.

'(Don't Fear) The Reaper' may be the most brilliant Cult item committed to wax; the radical nature of its Byrds-ish arrangement shouldn't disguise the fact. The other standout is Albert Bouchard-Patti Smith's 'Debbie Denise'. To think that an outfit that launched its recording career as a (albeit singularly tasteful) heavy-metal behemoth has produced its 'Walk Away Renee' on this fourth studio Ip is astonishing. The track suggests a totally novel brand of power pop (with cursory hat-tips to Tommy James and late Mott The Hoople).

Surprisingly enough, the Cult's step back into the basics reveals itself as one giant stylistic leap forward. On the strength of 'The Reaper', 'Morning Final' and 'E.T.I.', it looks as if they're beginning to approach their music potential which, like the icy plains and dark waters they traverse, is vast.

Gene Sculatti || Crawdaddy

Heep up, BOC down, Boston coming

Where Uriah Heep's exploratory studio endeavours fall short, Blue Oyster Cult, the New York group of mystics and madmen, pick up and fly away.

Their newest album, Agents of Fortune, is a definite progression for the band.

Dipping from a successful past and veering into a promising future, the group has assembled an excellent combination of songs.

The album opens up with Messerchmidt-like guitars from Eric Bloom, Allen Lanier and "Buck Dharma" Roeser on "This Ain't the Summer of Love." The cut is typical of both new styles of Blue Oyster Cult, but it quickly rifles into "True Confessions," a comic rock'n'roller that includes a horn arrangement by the Brecker Brothers (guest appearances being somewhat of an innovation for the malevolent maniacs).

Even Patti Smith sounds good on "The Revenge of Vera Gemini." The song is haunting with a delicate, but evil, vocal intertwine from Smith and lead vocalist Bloom. The tune is as bizarre as its title curious.

The band is making definite progress lyrically as well as musically. Dropping idiotic lyrics like "She's as beautiful as a foot," Blue Oyster Cult has opted for intelligent tunes like "Don't Fear The Reaper" (the album's best composition) and "E.T.I. (Extra Terrestrial Intelligence)."

Blue Oyster Cult will, when the time comes, be recognized as America's premier hard rockers as long as they continue to do the work they have done on "Agents of Fortune."

Doug Pullen || The University Daily

Blue Oyster Cult: Spectres (Columbia)

As I listen to this album, I can just see those veteran BOC fans turning purple at the thought of these one-time heavy metal wizards moving further in the less visceral direction hinted at on their last LP, AGENTS OF FORTUNE. To me, this sixth Cult project does not represent a "selling-out" (an accusation which the BOC hit "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" is certain to bring about) but simply an acceptance of mid-seventies sensibility into the Cult's basic rock framework. SPECTRES thus comes off as one of their most satisfying LP's.

True, the majority of the cuts here can be called "laid-back" in comparison to the Cult products of the past. But then again, rarely have I heard this band so melody-conscious; and wrapping these gems in metallic packages would be a mistake. One is best off here removing from his mind all preconceived notions of the BOC "sound" and just driftin with this superb new approach.

All this is not to say that, however, that the Cult is ready for a tour with Seals & Crofts. Hardly. The nasty edge we've come to expect is still there, making "Godzilla," "Golden Age Of Leather" and "R.U. Ready 2 Rock" all orgies of energy. Vocalist Eric Bloom proves sufficiently caustic on these, as his lines are emphasized by Don Roeser's flawless lead guitar and driven home by Al and Joe Bouchard's drums and bass (respectively).

This album really stuns me, though, when the boys substitute for this drive an agility I had no idea they possessed. On lighter numbers like "Death Valley Nights," "I Love The Night" and "Nosferatu," the rhythm section moves with a delicacy and precision of a jazz unit, while the remainder of the band waxes just as sympathetic to the fragility of the songs. Roeser is again of great importance here, his imaginative - yet ballsy - fills playing an effective foil to the overall calm.

Conceptually, SPECTRES shows that you can't teach an old band new tricks, as the Cult gets their usual sci-fi (the album is sandwiched by odes to horror film celebrities, "Godzilla" and "Nosferatu") and love songs with strange twists. All the numbers, save the multi-sectioned "Golden Age of Leather," are fairly short and conventionally developed, which should ensure a follow-up to "(Don't Fear) The Reaper."

Oh, excuse me; I wasn't supposed to bring up the subject of hit potential when discussing these one-time emperors of the esoteric. They've found an impressive mid-ground between the gritty and the pretty, though, and they should be commended for it.

Mark Kmetzko || Scene Entertainment Weekly

Blue Oyster Cult: Spectres

SINCE 1971 this band has been one of the few HM perpetrators worth listening to. Since 1974's Secret Treaties it has been only one. If heavy metal was leaden then BOC were more like polished chrome.

Their lyrics were arcane in the extreme and often impenetrable, helping label BOC as the only intelligent heavy metal band. Personally I thought BOC were pretty stupid, but fun. I liked the music and trappings because they were over the top in a very American way.

But when Agents Of Fortune came out though I could hardly believe my ears. BOC had unveiled music of stunning proportions; each song on Agents had more depth and detail than most than bands achieve in whole albums. Musically too, BOC had moved to an altogether higher plane. Relegating Sandy Pearlman to the role of producer, rather than lyricist and general over-seer, and allowing the band members to come upfront put BOC one short step-away from becoming a world class band.

It's obvious from Spectres that this is something of which they are acutely aware. Identifiable elements of 'Reaper' are meticulously included. This is reflected in the cover as it hints at the supernatural, hidden knowledge and power, from this same knowledge. These themes, central to the 'Reaper' storyline, are carried through many of the songs, as are those of the power of love and fatal female attraction. In 'I Love The Night', for example, during a forlorn evening walk the protagonist meets a mysterious woman. Though it is never stated, she is a spectre. Like 'Reaper', the music has an eerie feel, it suggests the same subliminal yearning and surrender, with faint, breathy harmonies and a magical guitar sequence. This is probably the most, obvious instance, but the traces are also evident in 'Nosferatu', 'Celestial The Queen', 'Death Valley Night' and 'Fireworks'.

However the assimilation of 'Reaper' into the Cult main-stream has been achieved without sacrificing their previous qualities. 'Golden Age Of Leather' and 'R U Ready 2 Rock' come on like the work of madmen let loose with the best hard-railed HM sound in existence. The former is a bikers' lament for that one last ride, the latter a Pearlman special that could be as straightforward as the title, but probably isn't.

Each song is a small master-piece of form and composition. The Cult deploy their armour throughout with a tacit understanding that they are playing songs and not merely numbers with riffs. Because of this and the Pearlman / Krugman production, the music takes on an almost cinematic quality. Each song is a sketch, atmospheric and colourful. This is most evident on 'Nosferatu'. A chilling, sublime song that evokes Dark Age Europe and forgotten ritual.

Spectres is more adventurous than Agents. The notable surprises are 'Godzilla', about, naturally, a rampaging monster and close to Dictators territory, and 'Goin' Through The Motions' (co-written by one Ian Hunter), fine, tight pop with grandiose synthesiser power chords and a wry lyric - how can you sing "we're going through the motions" and mean it. Otherwise, the difference is one of tone.

Lyrically Spectres is a twilit world; the music is therefore more cerebral. BOC have weaved melody and texture into their music to an even greater degree. The result is like the difference between mere crushed carbon and the cut diamond. Spectres has no flaws.

Paul Rambali || NME

Spectres - Blue Oyster Cult - Columbia (JC 35019)

The Blue Oyster Cult has always been plagued by image problems of its own creation. By taking heavy metal to its literary extreme, the Cult made itself an in-joke to intellectual rockers and the consummate heavy-guitar band to the teenage underbelly. If anything gave the Cult a cogent image, it was the group's recorded sound — dense and spacey with sledgehammer rhythms that sounded as if they were being beamed in from an orbiting satellite. But by the time it recorded its live album, the Cult was in a bind: its popularity had plateaued and its audience was almost exclusively composed of guitar-hungry, get-down kids. Which is cool—the Cult is nothing if not guitar-heavy, get-down kids—but ultimately limiting.

It's not surprising then that the two riff rockers on Spectres, the crucial followup to last year's breakthrough, Agents of Fortune, direct themselves toward that heavy-metal paradox. "Godzilla" encapsulates the Cult's stylistic attitude: the conceit of the tune must inevitably be larger than its execution. On its first album, the Cult sang about "Cities on Flame with Rock & Roll," and the theme is the same here: Godzilla rips apart Tokyo with the same monstrous bravado of the riffing guitars that destroyed the kids. In this case, though, the idea is more attractive than the song.

"R.U. Ready 2 Rock" finds the Cult confronting its audience. "I ain't gonna catch those get-down blues," they sing over a thudding beat that dissolves into a bridge and finds them boasting, "I only live to be born again." This give-and-take with the audience forms the initial frame-work of Spectres, but the meat of the album is something else altogether. Spectres is the Blue Oyster Cult's love album, both literally romantic and allegorical, and the band's view of such liaisons is as dynamic as its relationship with its audience.

At the conclusion of "R.U. Ready 2 Rock," the band pulls out the stops on a boogie beat after singer Eric Bloom finds his mythical lover. This ambiguous "you" (is it his audience or a lover?) is carried over into "Goin' through the Motions," a sturdy rocker cowritten by Ian Hunter and Bloom. Depicting the love games played on one-night stands with appropriate sarcasm, the tune deftly culls a line from the Cult's first album standard, "Stairway to the Stars": "I'll even sign it, 'love to you,' again," and the attitude of an arrogant rock star becomes the same as that of a snobbish lover.

Beyond the aforenamed riffers that open each side, the Cult's music is more subtly crafted than ever before, continuing in the sleek, textured vein that provided the highlights of Agents of Fortune. "I Love the Night," which bends the tale of Dracula into a perverse love story, features the dense guitar orchestration of "(Don't Fear) The Reaper." "Nosferatu" boasts the same heady complexion, with vocal harmonies and Allen Lanier's rolling piano providing a properly celestial backdrop for the romantic epic. The words are hard to catch—I'm told it's about another bloodsucker — but "only a woman can break his spell" sticks out like an Adam's apple.

Lanier's "Searching for Celine," his only composition on the album, is the Cult's best new song. Combining riffing verses with a jet-stream chorus, it also contains the album's ultimate romantic image: "Love is like a gun/And in the hands of someone like you, it kills/But oh, what a thrill!" Its sister song, "Celestial the Queen," one of two songs cowritten by New York rocker Helen Wheels, is another standout, with a seamless rock sound that recalls the Who's Quadrophenia. It is this smooth integration of styles that has allowed the Cult to transform the boogie beast into a more progressive but no less combustible animal.

"Fireworks" boasts all the qualities of the Cult's new approach, combining multiple layers of guitars with harmonic vocal sweetening. The Cult has always prided itself on being a New York band, but it has been the addition of folk-rock vocal harmonies to its already riveting heavy-metal attack that has enabled the group to produce an album as stunningly consistent as Spectres. The band still remains anonymous behind the slick sheen of the recording studio, and the voices, too, eschew personality for the sake of fitting into the cerebral context. But the Cult's creative combination of styles has pioneered a new genre of MOR heavy metal. Hard as nails but as sweet as cream, Spectres shows the Blue Oyster Cult to be the Fleetwood Mac of heavy metal.

John Milward || Rolling Stone