Home Read Classic Album Review: Various Artists | Rock Star

Classic Album Review: Various Artists | Rock Star

The metal movie soundtrack crams as many hard-edged styles as it can into an hour.

This came out in 2001 – or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):

 


There are as many kinds of rock stars as there are rock styles, and this soundtrack to the new Mark Wahlberg metal movie crams as many hard-edged styles as it can into an hour.

You got your classic ’70s icons (KISS’s Lick It Up, Ted Nugent’s Stranglehold), your ’80s hair-metalloids (Bon Jovi’s Livin’ on a Prayer, Mötley Crüe’s Wild Side), your popsters (INXS’s Devil Inside), your grunge icons (Everclear’s Rock Star) and even your alterna-rockers (Third Eye Blind’s Forget Myself, Verve Pipe’s Colourful). For true metal fans, though, the selling point might be a handful of tracks by the movie’s fictional band Steel Dragon — played by Ozzy Osbourne guitarist Zakk Wylde, Dokken bassist Jeff Pilson and second-generation drum god Jason Bonham — which offer a solidly entertaining blast of riff-rock nostalgia in headbangers like Livin’ the Life, Stand Up and Blood Pollution. One quibble: For a movie inspired by the story of Judas Priest, surely they could have found some way to get one Priest track on here.

Previous articleClassic Album Review: Afroman | Good Times
Next articleClassic Album Review: Bif Naked | Purge