Shout at the Devil is the second studio album by American heavy metal band Mötley Crüe, released on September 26, 1983. It was the band's breakthrough album, establishing Mötley Crüe as one of the top selling heavy metal acts of the 1980s. The singles "Looks That Kill" and "Too Young to Fall in Love" were moderate hits for the band.
Video Shout at the Devil
Overview
Shout at the Devil was Mötley Crüe's breakthrough success, bringing them to international attention. The album's title and the band's use of a pentagram brought the band a great deal of controversy upon its 1983 release, as Christian and conservative groups claimed the band was encouraging their listeners to worship Satan.
The album was a continuation of Mötley Crüe's participation in the early 1980s glam metal scene.
Maps Shout at the Devil
Reception
In a contemporary review for The Village Voice, Robert Christgau panned Shout at the Devil and felt the band's commercial appeal lay in false braggadocio on an album that is poor "even by heavy metal standards". Rolling Stone's J. D. Considine found their style of rock formulaic, innocuous, and unoriginal: "The whole point of bands like Motley Crue is to provide cheap thrills to jaded teens, and that's where the album ultimately disappoints." In The Rolling Stone Album Guide (2004), he dismissed the music as "a distressingly mild-mannered distillation of Kiss and Aerosmith clichés". The magazine would later rank the album 44th in their 2017 "100 Greatest Metal Albums of All Time", anyway.
AllMusic's Barry Weber was more positive in a retrospective review; citing Shout... as their best album, which "displays Mötley Crüe's sleazy and notorious (yet quite entertaining) metal at its best." Canadian journalist Martin Popoff considered Shout at the Devil inferior to Mötley's debut album, but found its music extremely addictive if unoriginal and called it "punk rocking lobotomy metal". Adrian Begrand of PopMatters called the album a "timeless L.A. metal classic", which "people often forget how dark, how sleazy, how menacing ... really is". In his opinion, it contains the band's best singles and "remains to this day Mötley Crüe's finest hour".
"Without this album, a lot of the great hair metal bands wouldn't have come about," observed Satchel of Steel Panther. "Theatre of Pain was more of their glam look, but Shout at the Devil was such a great record. It was fuckin' sick. They set the bar. People looked at that and said, 'Fuck, we gotta dress up cool, man.'
Shout at the Devil peaked at No.17 on the Billboard 200. The singles "Looks That Kill" and "Too Young to Fall in Love", peaked at No.54 and No.90 respectively on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1984, while "Shout at the Devil" peaked at No. 30 on the Mainstream Rock chart. The album was awarded 4x Platinum (reaching the four million mark in shipments) on May 15, 1997.
"When a band like us put out Shout at the Devil," Sixx observed in 2000, "and the label does zero marketing, zero publicity and takes zero trade adverts, and you sell five million records, then everybody starts patting themselves on the back. But it's Mötley Crüe that did that, not Elektra Records."
Track listing
2003 remastered edition
In 2003, the band re-issued their albums on their own label Mötley Records, including added bonus tracks from each album's specific era. The bonus tracks of the remastered edition of Shout at the Devil are mainly composed of demos, but include also the previously unreleased song "I Will Survive", which was recorded in the same sessions. The song "Black Widow", included in the Red, White & Crüe compilation, was also recorded and left off this album. The track "Hotter than Hell" was later renamed and re-recorded into "Louder Than Hell" on the Theatre of Pain album. This edition also sports a warning that the album may contain masked backwards messages. This is in reference to Sixx and Lee chanting "Jesus is Satan" as an underdub on the title track.
A limited edition "Mini-LP" Compact Disc version of the album was released in the Japanese market, featuring the original cover that was previously available only on the vinyl LP release.
Personnel
Mötley Crüe
- Vince Neil - lead vocals
- Mick Mars - electric and acoustic guitars, backing vocals
- Nikki Sixx - bass guitar, bass pedals, backing vocals
- Tommy Lee - drums, backing vocals
Additional musicians
- Geoff Workman aka Allister Fiend - narrator on "In the Beginning"
- Jai Winding - keyboards
- Paul Fox - keyboards
- Tom Kelly - background vocals
- Richard Page - background vocals
Production
- Tom Werman - producer
- Geoff Workman - engineer
- Doug Schwartz - assistant engineer
- George Marino - mastering at Sterling Sound, New York
- Bob Defrin - cover art
Charts
Certifications
References
Source of article : Wikipedia
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