[Cloggy]

A couple of more reviews.......

Meat Loaf - Couldn't Have Said It Better (Myself)
As even his harshest critics will admit, Meat Loaf is a genuine rock'n'roll superstar. And as even his greatest admirers must concede, he isn't exactly good at coming up with new ideas. For the last couple of decades he's done little more than churn out variations of his greatest hit Bat Out Of Hell - and the fact that it gets yet another airing here as a bonus track is a good warning of what's to come. Just about every one of these twelve (very lengthy) songs follows the same formula - Meat Loaf's been dumped, he's not terribly happy and he's going to let the rest of the world know all about it. The result is a collection of one-paced, old-fashioned rock ballads that even the old ham's fans will find it difficult to get too worked up about. True, his great bellow of a voice is in pretty good shape and at least he doesn't seem to take himself too seriously. But it's still hard to escape the feeling that this is Meat Loaf on autopilot - and as such, not an album that anyone really needs in their collection.
Reviewed by Andrew Lynch. Published on the 09/04/2003

Album: Meat Loaf
Couldn't Have Said It Better, Mercury
By Andy Gill
28 March 2003


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.