100 Hair Metal Essentials

As I stated in the review Electronica 101, I had had the attitude with regards to Cleopatra Records had jumped the shark in the late 90's and 2000's, but I've had to reconsider that. As I noted, the one thing that Cleopatra has done that didn't make it at all onto the Electronica 101 album at all is re-release the 80's hair metal bands. I did go back and make a playlist for Spotify that used the songs from Electronica 101 and the songs from a compilation from the Cleopatra sub-label Deadline Records called 100 Hair Metal Essentials from 2010. I also threw in the songs from another Cleopatra compilation from 2008 called Covered in 80's Hits, which is simply a collection of artists released by Cleopatra doing covers of hits from the 80's. The playlist is listenable. It is a very different organism from the compilations that the company put out in the 90's. It's largely either campy music from the 80's or campy music that sounds like it was from the 80's but actually was. That's where the labels evolution became. That's okay by me. I'll be honest, the material on the 100 Hair Metal album is solid, but the way to listen to it is not all in a row, but to mix it up with other things, because I probably couldn't take a 100 hair metal songs in a row. I think hair metal was a strongly influenced by cocaine use as 80's new wave music was. Both the 80's dance clubs and the hair band scene where sort of notorious for cocaine use. They both have a kind of odd, plastic detachment to them. Those people could really play their instruments well, it has a certain camp value, and their songs were usually only a few minutes long. One song is sort of hard to tell one song from another or one band for another. I've always really liked the Cult who only went through a hair metal phase, but I don't there's an individual specific hair metal band that stands up to 80's Voivod. Those hair metal bands were never as interesting musically as other kinds of metal developing in the 80's. That's why it is more listenable if it's included in a more general retrospective of 80's type music. That being said, for 100 Hair Metal Essentials, they put together as much quality music as they could. It's just that Pretty Boy Floyd have cover of their fellow hair band Motley Crue's "Girls, Girls, Girls" that I would have difficulty distinguishing from the original. I always kind of liked "Don't Close Your Eyes" by Kix about a groupie having a drug overdose. That's on 100 Hair Metal Essentials. I have difficulty listening to it without convulsing in laughter.