Steel Panther - Balls Out

Ballsy or Bollocks?

If you initially came across this cd face down and had a cursory read of the track listing, you could be forgiven for anticipating a romantic/lost love lyrical disposition with songs like If You Really, Really Love Me; Tomorrow Night and Why Can't You Trust Me. However, face up and in your face, an even more cursory image reading will still immediately shatter that expectation. Flipping over for a more comprehensive view of that set list and you'll soon be smirking or salivating - depending, I suspect, on your age - at titles like Supersonic Sex Machine [derivative and tame], Just Like Tiger Woods [comically suggestive], 17 Girls In A Row [macho fantasy], It Won't Suck Itself [rising up - excuse me - the explicit register], Let Me Cum In [yuck] and Weenie Ride [this did make me laugh out loud].

Let's deal with the music first. A glam/hair metal band, Steel Panther cut their chops as a covers group throughout most of the first decade of the new millennium until the 2009 release of Feel the Steel which in the UK sold 45,000 copies. That makes an interesting comparison with The Answer's debut album of the same year selling 30,000 copies here. This doesn't need over-analysis: it's a preference for heavy metal over rock, and that doesn't surprise me. This 80s musical reincarnation is without question effectively aped by the band. On record they're Metal personified. I haven't seen them live - but know those who have - and by all accounts they're blistering. And this album doesn't disappoint in that respect.

Now let's do a lit-crit on the lyrics. Just joking. Characterised as 'profane' on Wikipedia [!], they are certainly very naughty. Having questioned if the lyrics in Metallica/Lou Reed's album Lulu are gratuitous and puerile [asked rhetorically, because they aren't] there isn't a need to ask this of Balls Out because they so clearly are. Even the apparently innocuous If Your Really.... has the early lines If you really really really really love me/Then you really really really gotta show me/Don't whine when I put it in your booty. It's immediately much more problematic with 17 Girls.......I banged 17 girls in a grocery store and never lost my erection, no/They had to mop all sperm in aisle 3 and some poop in the fruit sec-sec-section, stinky. Do we give the band the benefit of doubt that this is comic, if salacious hyperbole? Just tongue-in-cheek? Whilst I baulk at the notion of this being 'profane', I'm not comfortable with this, and the rest of the song [the storyline is sustained], because it is patently crass. If I felt the need to construct a more convincing argument I could quote plenty of other - and worse - lyrics in support, but I won't print that here. Listen and decide for yourself. It's more than 'naughty' and I started with that as a ruse to set one pole against the other, the latter informing the crude songs dominating the lyrical focus on this album.

When the TV presenter Eamonn Holmes, interviewing a rape victim recently on the This Morning programme, can suggest that next time she take a taxi home, we have to think carefully about how men refer to women or comment in response to how they have been treated. And I'll make this simpler: Holmes is a twat and it doesn't take any thinking at all. And with respect to that statement, I won't print the cover of the album at the head of this review as I normally would.