Album Review: Meatloaf, "Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell"

The skills of Messrs Loaf and Steinman are a marriage made in heaven. The prologue, all roaring Harleys, leads into "I'd Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That."

"Objects in the Rear View Mirror" is a chilling ballad on which Meat's vox quivers shamelessly. "Out of the Frying Pan" reminisces, as does "Lost Boys and Golden Girls." Both these reworked tracks were originally featured on Steinmen's Bad for Good as was "Rock and Roll Dreams Come Through."

In this day and age Bat II will be accused of being overblown and pompous. Would you settle for anything less?

Grade 5/5

Joe Mackett
Riff Raff Metal Magazine
December 1993

Revenge...?

Riff Raff was a legendary rock magazine based in London in the late 1980s and 1990s. Edited by the ultimate music biz insider, Mark Crampton, and employing such talents as Mark Blake, Jerry Ewing, Mike Harris, Paul Smith, Chris Collingwood, Alan McCrorie, Simon Robinson, Lyn Guy, Anna Marx, Nick Douglas, Marion Garden, Peter "Grunty" Grant, Joe "The Crow" Mackett, Billy "The Kluck" Kulke, and, lastest and mostest, the incredible Liddell Brothers, Mark (a.k.a. "El Perro") and Colin (a.k.a. "Der Fly"). Unfortunately, Riff Raff was just too R n' R for its own good. A genuine working class rock mag, written, edited, and translated into 16 European languages in a drug-N-Jack-D-fuelled haze, often on the back of motorbikes, with spell checking by our staff of attentive rock bimbos (chosen purely for their blondeness and big knockers), it soon fell behind more trainspotterly, nerdish, and politically correct publications like Q, Kerrang, Mojo, Metal Hammer, and Horse & Hound. This website is an archive and kind of shrine dedicated to the writing of its greatest writers, some of whom, luckily for the Rock Kosmos, still continue to write about music. This is the REVENGE of Riff Raff...Rock on!