REVIEW: Motley Crue – Swine Sampler (1997 promo)

MOTLEY CRUE – Swine Sampler (1997 Elektra promo EP)

Promo CDs are a funny thing.  Any promotional CD that you have ever seen or owned was free at some point in its life.  Since promos were intended to be play copies, or giveaways, selling them was highly frowned upon.  When I say “frowned upon” I mean illegal though not heavily enforced.  So it is funny that this 23 year old Motley Crue promo has “STOLEN FROM CKWR” (the very station that hosts Rob Daniels’ Visions In Sound), written on the disc in black marker.  I did my duty and reported it to CKWR just now, but weirdly enough they could care less!

The real crime here is the “clean” version of a Motley Crue song from Generation Swine, and it is an absolute hatchet job.  Unlistenable.

Why would you even bother with a “clean version” of “Find Myself”?  The very second line in the song is “I gotta find myself some BEEP”!  (The word was “drugs”!)  The first line of the chorus is “I’m a sick mother BEEP er!”  Utterly ridiculous.  You’d think someone would have played it once and said “this is unreleasable”.  I counted seven beeps in under three minutes.

If you prefer, the “dirty” version of “Find Myself” is on the CD too.  Why was the record company Elektra pushing that song so hard?  It’s a weird punky track with Nikki Sixx on vocals for the verses, with the returning Vince Neil handling the choruses.  Not the kind of thing you’d really think to push at fans all excited about Vince coming back, right?  But here it is, twice.  Though the chorus is good, I’m not going out on a limb by calling this song “shitty”.  Or BEEP-y!

Much, much, much better are the album tracks “Let Us Prey” and “Shout at the Devil ’97”.   First, “Let Us Prey”.  This is the only track that sounds like a progression from the ’94 self-titled album with John Corabi.  Crabby even has a writing credit on it, and who knows, maybe that’s him screaming “Let us hunt!”  Tommy Lee did that, according to Tommy Lee, but I think it sounds like John.  It was certainly written for John to sing.  “Shout ’97” is a cool remake of a song that didn’t need remaking, but it was 1997 so what’re ya gonna do?  Added samples and a dance-y beat made it pretty irresistible.  Mick Mars threw down some cool new licks here, although the droning guitars are very dated.  Still, passing grade for “Shout ’97”.

Even though this CD has two good tunes out of four tracks, the “clean” one is such an atrocity that this gets:

0/5 stars

and the dreaded Flaming Turd.

 

29 comments

  3. Front cover is cool. lol. I have always said that if the Nikki and Tommy along with there egos would have shaved off 4 songs off of Swine it would have been a decent album. Crabby got hosed on this album which is a shame.

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    1. I’m cool with Miley. I like her. She’s not a pop star anymore. She shed that skin when she worked with the Flaming Lips. I don’t need a Metallica covers album, but it WILL get people to discover Metallica!

      Screw clean versions!

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