This album comes with plenty of reading matter. It is littered with quotes from, amongst others, the bible, Barack Obama, Che Guavara and Sidney Allen Johnson. The latter is the one man project that is Babylon Mystery Orchestra. Words replace lyrics here. This is the man’s fifth release, in which, we’re told, he “stands athwart the progressive liberalism that has invented his country and he demands that it be stopped”.
Basically this is a series of opinionated rants. The gist of the message the liberalism and equality preached by politicians and others equate to lies, false conformity and acquiescence. Mr Johnson rejects this godless world. Everyone gets it in the neck, starting with rock and movie stars who on “Catspaw” commit the crime of supporting the system. Equal rights and political correctness are exposed as oppression on “Hate Crime”, there’s an anti-abortion hatefest on “A Constitutional Right / Jesus Save …” communist values get it on “Viva Cristo Rey” and self-perceiving liberals are just spoilt children on “Godless”. “Promise them a paradise and it all turns into Hell” is the nihilistic message on “Ruin”. Inevitably all this man-made fiction descends into chaos and so “The Twelfth Imam” returns to save the world from itself. You get the idea.
So does this apocalyptic, hate-filled rant have any musical quality? One thing I will say for it is that the music is as bleak and dark as the subject matter. “Catspaw” is as upbeat as it gets, and that’s not saying much. It’s mid-paced, sludgy deep-in-the-range Rock, not unlike Canned Heat. It’s repetitive and Mr Johnson churns out the words in a deep, semi-spoken growl. It all has the tones of Rammstein without the irony, humour or self-depreciation. I detected some early 70s psychedelia here and there and it’s Gothic in its uniform bleakness but in a nutshell it’s largely repetitive, tiresome, dark rock, just like the subject matter.
Rather than a piece of music this comes across as a collection of sermons as you might see from one of those god-fearing evangelistic preachers on US television. All credit to Mr Johnson for a good bit of self-publicity but it’s hard to see how anyone sufficiently open or musically minded might want to share in this experience. At the end of the day, we can choose our own path we follow.
http://www.myspace.com/babylonmysteryorchestra
