Lucifer Star Machine – Satanic Age

“As hate and stupidity collide, even the blind shall see the truth …” But before that happens, an observation. There has been a worrying and quite bewildering rise in the number of sensitive young men finding success in the popular music industry in recent years. These fellows seem determined to monetise their insecurities and celebrate their longing in song form, often accompanied by sad piano motifs or wistful strumming on small guitars. Their self-effacing ballads, often performed in high voices and an odd mid-Atlantic accent, are sickly diary entries, or adolescent poetry of the most execrable kind addressed to ethereal fantasy figures for whom the singer is not good or worthy enough.

Confession – I base this analysis on an admittedly small sample – my five-minute drive to work during which I am exposed (due to In Car Entertainment technical failure) only to our local commercial radio station. Ten minutes a day, as well as peripheral exposure to an in-house 11-year-old’s music consumption habits, has convinced me that the entire nation is only listening to these whingeing fools, and their success and popularity is only encouraging fresh hordes of wispily-bearded minstrels to try their luck.

You can imagine then my delight to receive an album to review that contained a song called Cunt of Destruction. ‘Aha’, said I, ‘Here surely is the antidote.’ Thank God for Lucifer Star Machine. Well, technically, we should thank Satan, because this album is called Satanic Age.

Lucifer Star Machine are so brilliant that if they didn’t exist, someone would have to make them up. This is the fifth album from the outrageously tuneful German outfit and, without mincing words, it is the most brutally effective melodic rock punk album I have ever experienced. To try to imagine this band, you would have to conjure up the mental experience of Lemmy fronting The Darkness, with all the pomp and bluster that implies. Even if neither of those artistes are to your taste, Lucifer Star Machine will batter you into submission until you kneel before them. Not only are they loud and dangerous, they’re also masters of the fucking obvious – the pretty guitar trickery, the rabble-rousing shouty chorus, the thunder of drums and the growliest bass riffs – and if this sounds like a melange of cliches, you may well be right. But know this: Lucifer Star Machine don’t give one fuck.

To pick through this album song by song would exhaust any reviewer’s stock of superlatives because it really is that good. Even disregarding the tongue-in-cheek sound effects (gunshots, spittoon) and the weapons grade profanity, this is a brutal masterclass in rock songcraft. Some of it is even borderline radio-friendly. You’ll find hints and nods to pretty much everything you have loved and admired in the metal/punk crossover. It’s Kiss, it’s Misfits, it’s Maiden. It’s 12 brutally brilliant tracks of over-the-top, Satan-themed theatre that Alice Cooper could only dream of creating, brought to demonic life over lockdown and now released into a world that badly needs this kind of slap in the face.

Tor Abyss, Mickey Necro, Mighty Ramon, Benny Zin and Captain Fettsau are here for your soul. I’d give it to them if I was you. Superb. Get Lucified.