Album: Meat Loaf

Couldn't Have Said It Better, Mercury

The title is a moot point: not only could Meat Loaf have said it better before; he has said it better before, and a few too many times, if truth be told. Not so much a one-trick pony, more a brewer's drayhorse whose round has become over-familiar through endless repetition, Meat Loaf seems stuck in the 1970s, condemned for ever to churn out minor variations on his Big Hit. It doesn't matter how much he tries to modernise things by adding a trip-hop beat half-way through the title track (a fairly sad-dad notion of "modern", to begin with) when the song has already played the Springsteen card with Aaron Zigman's piano detailing, which irresistibly recalls The E Street Band's Roy Bittan. It's still all just footnotes to "Thunder Road", but with the passion curdled into sub-operatic bombast. And while Springsteen, contrary to Paddy McAloon's assertion, has actually matured beyond the world of merely "cars and girls", there's something a little creepy about the way Meat Loaf's material still relies on an essentially adolescent representation of sexual relations. As always, Loaf is the spurned victim, his wounded heart given voice in that characteristic style, akin to the lachrymose bellowing of an emasculated ox. "I used to be a man of steel," he laments, "Now every bit of faith is gone." What's not gone, though, is "Bat out of Hell", an 11-minute live version of which is thrown in as a bonus track. It's as if his career has short-circuited back to its beginning.