Goddess of Love

“…Satan is king, who are the winners now?”

Another early Mausoleum casualty I’m absolutely thrilled I didn’t stumble upon when it hit the stands. It’s no big deal to scoop it up now and lose a few bucks, but in the years when birthday money and couch cushion change ruled my shopping sprees, it would’ve swelled the aversion I already felt for the label as well as colored this fella an unhappy scarlet red.

Prevalent within this virtually unknown Belgian band’s one n’ only, Goddess of Love, is medium-hard rock, bar band AOR that gets a few hairs knocked outta place in metal’s most basic breeze, and that’s the bad news. I guess the more promising news translates into flashes of attractive songwriting and performance that, whatever the style, should be tolerable, if not simply appealing on some level, and as a whole is nine tracks that I can't say try to be something they're not, no matter what we as metal fans assumed to expect. It’s an important factor we often forget, and the fallout – emotions like disappointment, anger, melancholy, frustration – caused by these unfair expectations and assumptions isn’t the band’s problem, but ours.

Conversely, if Goddess of Love was actually the follow-up to a deemed-metal precursor, such fallout would be predicted and naturally (hopefully) better understood by its creators (and would stick us in an alternate timeline dangerously close to when Def Leppard and Jaguar hatched their sell-out plans). I feel this same sense keeps those viewing a film like The Piano from criticizing it because of lack of bloodshed or a notable absence of hip-hop songs, know what I mean?

Kinda bare bones metal aside, I don’t mind declaring there are less stinkers on this disc than on some heavier Witchfynde lps I like to avoid. “No They Ain’t Gonna Catch Me” is the hand hovering above the snooze button; a natural-born hard rock dragster of medium-high Riot energy, aglow with lightly backlit keys peeling out in the lp’s opening spot. Probably nothing more than a coincidence is a song pattern that seems to mirror side one of Ride the Lightning: “NTAGCM” is the like-minded accelerate in “Fight Fire With Fire”, even-keeled and catchy “Mean Advice” is natural songcraft that relies on a smooth sing-songy chorus to toll the bell of story-driven, rhythmically slow-rolled and ultimately drab flight of “Icarus”. Convincing “Hell is For Children” (not a Pat Benatar cover) scratches the obligatory power ballad itch more appealingly than many that have faded out before it.

Things, however, fall off the lightning come side two, for its initial two and half minutes is the whoosh of “Infernal Downtrip”; an out of character, conga n’ keyboard-winded effects ‘instrumental’ that, like the barking of Rex the dog and unintelligible sludge-gurgling-laughed message, fails to convey anything meaningful. “Goddess of Love” shows a partial leg of her plastic new wave shimmy, uncovered further by Guido Wolfaert’s innocently-clean mid/high vocal delivery, which is then overridden by more “Mean Advice”-type stuff, only less interesting. Darkened doorstep “Night of Shadows” is an infectious choice cut of unforeseen brimstone, nuanced with Demon-like “Don’t Break the Circle” character, but withdraws when brighter-eyed “Recompence” lights the way with its lively gait and sociably-plucky keyboards. Ending Goddess of Love is the generic thrum of “The Joker”, riddle-less in its example of rock’s dinner music that should be banished from the forefront in favor of sautéed lima beans. It closes the disc as leftovers often do.

Goddess of Love can be known as a halfway decent, kinda dated hard rock album that here and there finds footing in metal. Or it can be known as a tepid metal album (too) steeped in fairly dusty ‘70s hard rock inspiration. Hey, guys! Welcome to the rock-metal-metal-rock Borderlands, where questionable genre-folding, split opinions, indecisiveness and bias lead the assumption/expectation/blame parade. I’ll bet Tormentor climbed aboard the first description, meanwhile a lot of us sat on the sidelines expecting something better than the second and nuthin’ else. Again, that’s a dilemma we stuck ourselves in.

Admittedly, Mausoleum’s logo, conceivably the band’s moniker and perhaps the patented Mausoleum/Ebony/Guardian-aura sleeve could lure this into metal’s damning criteria. However, in Tormentor’s defense, it's not impossible they had little to no knowledge of the then-current metal scene or any of the unwritten quasi-specs often associated with it, and for all we know had only marginally sampled the menus of those with generally similar tastes, more or less Dedringer, Ace Lane, Praying Mantis, Coney Hatch, Amulet (US-IN), Chevy, Fist (UK), some Krokus and the occasionally flowery palette of Alcatrazz.