Word: batted
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...TEEN COMMANDments, as revealed in Bat Out of Hell...
...star who's just been kneed by the school football coach -- could belong only to Marvin Lee Aday, known to the world as Meat Loaf. First as Eddie the zombie biker in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), then as star of writer-arranger Jim Steinman's ambitious album Bat Out of Hell (1977), Meat Loaf gave clarion clout to rock's first decadent period. The Bat LP sold oodles; one cut (Two Out of Three Ain't Bad) was a hit single; another (Paradise by the Dashboard Light) became an influential proto-video. And for a moment...
...film Streets of Fire. If the Druids had needed jingles for their oak-grove revelries, Steinman would have been the man to write them. But his songs needed Meat Loaf's urgency to lift their rude majesty to Ouch over High C. So the old colleagues reunited for Bat Out of Hell II: Back into Hell . . . It earned the obligatory pan from Rolling Stone ("low-octane operatic drivel") and seemed as likely to hit America's Top 40 as the piano stylings of Richard Klayderman...
Anachronistic? Defiantly. The blood on these guitars is Chuck Berry red. The production reverbs with the heavenly choirs, sleigh bells and mausoleum echoes of Phil Spector's wailing Wall of Sound. The lyric lines are long and chatty, with more pomp to the bomp. Bat II is the '50s, '60s and '70s, packed in steel and wrapped in Mylar. Or go back even further. Meat Loaf is not quite Jussi Bjorling, and Steinman ain't no Wagner, but in rock terms Bat Out of Hell II is a Gotterdammerung you can dance...
Music: Prime cuts from Meat Loaf in Bat Out of Hell...