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At first listen, Mötley Crüe’s New Tattoo,
their eighth studio album, feels like an underwhelming effort.
You might find yourself wondering what Nikki Sixx was thinking
when, in The Dirt, he called it “the album
that should have been the successor to Dr. Feelgood.”
New Tattoo, released in 2000, is the rare album
that is front-loaded with its weakest material. But even though
“Hell on High Heels, “Treat Me Like the Dog I
Am,” the title track and especially “Dragstrip
Superstar” have more than a few cringe-worth moments
and sound more like the output of a less talented Mötley
Crüe imitator than the band itself, they show us a group
ignoring trends and getting back to what it really is at its
core—a rock band that defines its sound with Mick Mars’
guitar and writes songs about girls, drugs, fast cars and
the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle. The worst of New
Tattoo easily trumps the best of their previous effort,
the misguided Generation Swine (1997).
Working with producer Mike Clink (Guns N’ Roses) and
with Sixx co-writing half of the album with James Michael,
Mötley simplified both its music and the process of creating
it, resulting in their rawest-sounding album since their debut,
Too Fast for Love (1981).
“There was no brain damage,” Vince Neil wrote
in The Dirt, “no waiting two weeks to get a
guitar tone or snare to sound just right. We went back to
basics and finally accepted the fact that we are Mötley
Crüe.”
New Tattoo is the first (and only) Mötley album
minus drummer Tommy Lee, who decided to leave the band while
serving time in jail in 1998 following an assault conviction.
His replacement is longtime Ozzy Osbourne drummer Randy Castillo,
so there isn’t a noticeable dropoff.
The disc picks up with track five, “1st Band on the
Moon,” a somewhat tongue-in-cheek tune that acknowledges
the Crüe’s role as a trendsetter throughout its
career and laments an American culture growing more conservative
by the day. “Punched in the Teeth by Love” sports
a strong enough “Looks That Kill” vibe that you
might think it’s 1983 all over again. “Hollywood
Ending” is the album’s second ballad and a marked
improvement over its first. The strongest song, “Fake,”
takes a pointed look at the hypocrisy in the music business;
you can virtually taste the venom dripping from Neil’s
voice. Another sign of the Crüe going back to their roots:
their first cover song in nearly a decade, the album-closing
“White Punks on Dope,” originally by The Tubes
in 1975.
New Tattoo is about half of a great Mötley
Crüe record, ranking above Generation Swine
and Theatre of Pain (1985), and slightly below Girls,
Girls, Girls (its position secured almost solely by “Wild
Side” and its title track). Looking back proved to a
step forward. Though it was not a hit, selling only 200,000
copies in the United States , it was exactly the shot of life
Mötley Crüe needed.
®2009 Live-Metal.net
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