Cocked and Loaded

After a 12-year hiatus, Al Jourgensen revived his toy band Revolting Cocks with a higher-profile cast than usual. Counterculture superstars Gibby Haynes and Jello Biafra have joined the party, which was bound to happen, but nobody could have foreseen Davíd Garza, ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons, and Cheap Trick's Rick Nielsen and Robin Zander as Cocks back when Revco was as much a way for the members of Front 242 to let off steam as it was for the folks in Ministry. The star-studded Cocked and Loaded was originally titled Purple Head and planned for 2004 with the track "Prune Tang" being handed over to the Internet for some buzz-generating. It didn't, which is a shame because the track hints at the great album that could have been: a raunchy Texas ass-kicker that both loves and mocks the synth-era ZZ Top while tipping the hat to the grittiest goth and industrial. Also capturing this excitement is "Caliente," an over-the-top cover of the legendary Bauhaus' "Dark Entries" with former Butthole Surfer Gibby Haynes adding enough of his cosmic ramblings to earn a new title for the tune. Nielsen positively shreds on the opening "Fire Engine," a cover of a lost Iggy Pop song on which Jourgensen gets co-writing credit (odd since the track dates back to demos Ig did with Ric Ocasek in 1983, the year Ministry was making their debut and not sounding very "Fire Engine" at all). Biafra's "Dead End Streets" ends the list of highlights before this horribly front-loaded album takes a turn for the worse. The second half of Cocked and Loaded tries too hard with humorous samples and sleazy joke songs clumsily trying to force a connection between this Revco and the one on Big Sexy Land, or at least Linger Ficken' Good... It's loud, shocking, and sorta fun for a spin, but one has to wonder if Jourgensen took the nonresponse to "Prune Tang" to heart and mistakenly went back to the drawing board. While it's the closest this throwaway band has come to a throwaway album, Cocked and Loaded works if you party harder and pass out earlier.