It doesn’t start, this album—it erupts, like a glam Frankenstein crawling out of a Motel 6 swimming pool filled with Jack Daniels and broken childhoods. Blackie Lawless, the butcher-poet of Sunset Strip, slams his boot on the gas and steers this beast straight into a bonfire of rock clichés, laughing maniacally the whole way.
The Crimson Idol is a concept album in the way a fever dream is a bedtime story. Jonathan Steele, the boy-turned-rock god, is less a character and more a scream trapped in vinyl. Daddy's rage, mommy's silence, industry vampires licking their lips—it's Pinocchio, if Geppetto was a bottle of vodka and the Blue Fairy was an A&R rep with a razor blade smile.
“Chainsaw Charlie” sounds like it was written in a burning office while the walls collapsed and the execs threw cocaine like confetti. Every riff is coated in blood and hairspray. Solos spiral out like black tar angels screaming into a canyon made of unpaid therapy bills.
Lawless isn’t singing—he’s exorcising. His voice is a rusted buzzsaw tangled in cassette tape. Somewhere between Iggy in a straitjacket and Meat Loaf at a funeral. The whole album is a mausoleum built for teenage dreams and PR-speak promises that curdled in the California sun.
It's not just tragic—it’s Shakespeare with leopard print and Marshall stacks. It's a cry for help turned up to 11, echoing off the hollow skulls of everyone who mistook fame for salvation. And in the end—spoiler alert, baby—Jonathan dies. Of course he dies. They all do. That's the price of being beautiful and broken in America’s carnival of mirrors.
This isn't just a record. It’s a suicide note written in eyeliner and gasoline.
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