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Album Details

• Artist: Rob Zombie
• Album: The Sinister Urge
• Label: Geffen
• Year of Release: 2001
• ME Rating:
• Reviewed by: solitaryman on 2013-05-07

After launching his solo career with the widely successful Hellbilly Deluxe, former White Zombie frontman Rob Zombie would spend a considerable amount of time on the road and on various other projects before settling down to work on his follow-up. The Sinister Urge would come three years later, and was received with notably more acclaim from fans and critics alike. And I've never been able to understand why.


Where much of Hellbilly Deluxe was a solid cohesion of industrial, dance and metal, The Sinister Urge strips back the layers and offers more in the way of a "standard band only" effort. That's not to say that there aren't a few instances of Zombie's trademark film samples, horror movie soundtrack backing tracks and the like, but the meshing of this and the music itself is almost entirely broken this time around. "Sinners Inc." is a decent enough intro, setting a bit of chilling atmosphere, but it's fractured quickly by "Demon Speeding" and "Dead Girl Superstar", two of the more vanilla and flat out boring tracks on the record. Stripped down from the bells and whistles of past successes, these tracks show that Zombie and his compatriots are better songwriters when working in layers of sound. This is my entire complaint with The Sinister Urge, and only a handful of tracks keep it from being truly dreadful. "Iron Head" has it where it counts despite its peers, with fitting guest vocals from Ozzy Osbourne and some of Rob's better work to boot. "Feel So Numb", I believe, earned its fame by being infectiously catchy, more along the lines of "Dragula" and early White Zombie hits. Towards the end of the record, the hard-hitting "Scum Of The Earth" ups the overall score considerably, while the truly morbid and creepy "House Of 1000 Corpes" works some dark acoustic magic, a wonderfully psychotic ode to the Firefly Clan from Zombie's movie of the same title.


A handful of decent to solid tracks doesn't keep The Sinister Urge from hitting an overall sour note with me. I had more expectations for this record than most when it first hit the shelves, and I could never shake the feeling of being just a little betrayed. This is not the same Rob Zombie that captured my attention prior. The best thing I can say about this is that it would help him transistion into a different, but effective, musical entity in the future.

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