February 24
Words by Jimmy Glinster
Love ‘em, or hate ‘em, you’ve gotta love this band, or hate them. That will mostly depend on if you’re offended by a guitar pedal named the Pussy Melter and/or are a complete fucking snowflake. Enough of that snowflake business though, but if you don’t find sexual innuendo comical and are offended by words like dick and pussy then best you stop reading, fuck right off and go listen to some Celine Dion.
Steel Panther waste no time in telling us that it’s Never Too Late (To Get Some Pussy Tonight). And if you’re already offended by that song title never fear, you’re already a pussy, so there is no need to find any. The riffs are rocking, and Michael Starr‘s vocals are on point both lyrically and musically. Throw in a shredding solo towards the end of the song, and you’ve got exactly what you would expect from this band.
The guitar in the intro to Friends With Benefits seems a little heavier in tone to the usual hard rock stylings of the band and the main riff is a bit of a heavy chugger. The verses pull back a little to return to more of a familiar late 80s early 90s glam rock sound. Due to typing this while I’m listening to the track, I haven’t caught up with too many of the lyrics, but I’m sure they are fucking hilarious as always. As I start to pay attention, I’m smashed with another shredding guitar solo which instantly distracts me.
Our first “ballad” for the album is titled On Your Instagram, which appears to be about falling in love with a girl on Instagram and then being catfished. If you don’t know what that means, look It up, and catch the fuck-up, it’s twenty fucking twenty-three. “Your”, in this instance refers to the girl he has fallen in love with on her Instagram, not the catfish in front of him. Well played!
The intro to Put My Money Where Your Mouth Is reminds me a lot of another song out of the 80s, but I’ll leave that up to you to figure out. This one’s not as rocking as I expected with that intro riff, but it still goes ok. The verses are a bit slow though, and it doesn’t ever really pick up pace. Not my favourite track so far.
1987 opens with a reference to Appetite for Destruction and Poison looking so good that Michael thought he was gay. This is another one of those “rock ballads”. Reference after reference from that very year 1987 makes me think back, but who the fuck am I kidding, I was 7 years old and probably listening to my mum’s Michael Jackson records back then. If you were born 10 or so years earlier than me this song will probably mean a lot more to you, but for me, it’s just a song about 1987.
A tasty little guitar lick opens up proceedings for Teleporter, and it continues on to be somewhat of a hard rock thrasher. The riffs are good, and the lyrics are your typical Steel Panther references to hot chicks. The whole teleporter thing doesn’t really make sense though and nor does the song. I’m sure there’s a funny story behind it or something, but I don’t get it. Seems a little too serious for a Steel Panther song.
I’m sure we all asked ourselves this question before, Is My Dick Enough. And I guess the answer to that can only be given by the person on the other end of it. The lyrics are fucking hilarious as expected, but the song is a bit of a slow groover with some kind of strange country vibe to it.
Was that dick enough for the Magical Vagina? Who knows, but the synth at the start of this track is a bit much. This one is another ballad to begin with, but it does step up a little in the choruses. One thing is clear here, this band love the vagina, and this song will probably bring some more of it their way.
A solid drum beat with some weird synth undertone opens All That And More. The bass and vocals join in very quickly and the guitar starts making some random stabs over the top. Again, this song has a much slower pace than the hard rock I expect from this band. The bass tone fucking rocks though. Apparently, Michael’s dick is all that and more, this song isn’t though.
Finally, the band gets back to some hard rock. Hopefully, they don’t rock too hard early on though like a One Pump Chump. The lyrics are exactly what you’d expect and the band rocks hard for much longer than your average one-pump chump. Probably the hardest song so far.
Another ballad called Pornstar is the next track up. The song is musically boring as fuck, but again the lyrics are fucking hilarious. It’s a slow burner, a real slow burner and so is the following track Ain’t Dead Yet which I skip over once I hear the acoustic guitars. It’s probably good, but I ain’t got no time for a soppy pop song.
The final track Sleeping On the Rollaway opens with probably the best riff on this album so far. It’s hard rock, which is what I wanted for the majority of this album. It’s maybe a little too late though, and maybe not that great. It is a song though, a song to end an album.
Well, it’s no one pump chump, but it did start off with intensity and then very quickly wither away. And much like your sex life, the longer it dragged on, the slower and less interesting it got. Maybe my expectations were too high much like all of your ex-lovers, or maybe it’s just because this band doesn’t have the stamina that they had back in 1987. Let’s just say that it wasn’t magical, and that they didn’t quite put their money where their mouth is.
