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Bat Out Of Hell

by

Meat Loaf

 
Bat Out Of Hell
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Avg: 4.0 (120 ratings)

The thoroughly ridiculous, completely brilliant sound of a brave pop visionary at the top of his game

  • We Say...

    Review by Mark Richardson

    "There's an opera out on the turnpike/There's a ballet being fought out in the alley." That's a line from Bruce Springsteen's ambitious "Jungleland," the West Side Story-like tale that closes his 1975 album Born to Run. That couplet's oversized romanticism serves as a pretty good jumping-off point for this massively successful record first released in 1977. Where the Boss sang of midnight gangs meeting beneath giant Exxon signs to explore the poetics of the street, Jim Steinman's songs on Bat Out of Hell are about love and hope and sex and dreams, small-scale bedroom dramas blown up to widescreen proportions and leavened with huge dollops of humor. And they're voiced by a guy who shares a name with your local diner's blue plate special, fresh off a stint singing in a Broadway production of Hair and acting in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. All of which is to say that Bat Out of Hell is a thoroughly ridiculous album that also happens to be completely brilliant, the sound of a pop visionary at the top of his game, bravely indulging every instinct without regard to fashion or good taste.

    Steinman, who would later apply some of the techniques on display here to Bonnie Tyler's epic "Total Eclipse of the Heart," is Bat Out of Hell's creative driving force. He was inspired by the "little symphonies for the kids" production of Phil Spector, the simultaneously cheeky and deadly serious pop theater of Shadow Morton's work with The Shangri-Las and the emoting-for-the-cheap-seats bombast of the musical. To this mix he added the visceral power of post '60s hard rock (extending the Springsteen connection, pianist Roy Bittan and drummer Max Weinberg from the E Street Band are on hand) and a flair for turning a dorky cliché into a pained expression of longing that also has a good punch line. So the chorus of the mid-tempo rocker "You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth" includes the line, "It must have been while you were kissing me," and then producer Todd Rundgren amplifies the effect by laying the whole thing over a blatantly appropriated "Be My Baby" drumbeat. Three songs extend well beyond 45 length, but radio and fans treated them like jukebox hits anyway, such was their undeniable sing-along intensity. The title track moves between rollicking roadhouse rock and hushed balladry, throwing in the sound of a revving motorcycle, but the most famous of the suites is of course "Paradise by the Dashboard Light". It tells a detail-packed story of teenage lust, offers a concise musical survey of rock'n'roll trends since the 1950s, and builds to an enormous climax. And then, just when it seems it can't get any more over-the-top, Phil Rizzuto, the voice of the New York Yankees, drops in to give the play-by-play of the sexual drama unwinding in the back seat. In this world, it makes perfect sense.

  • They Say...

    Review by Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide

    There is no other album like Bat Out of Hell, unless you want to count the sequel. This is Grand Guignol pop -- epic, gothic, operatic, and silly, and it's appealing because of all of this. Jim Steinman was a composer without peer, simply because nobody else wanted to make mini-epics like this. And there never could have been a singer more suited for his compositions than Meat Loaf, a singer partial to bombast, albeit shaded bombast. The compositions are staggeringly ridiculous, yet Meat Loaf finds the emotional core in each song, bringing true heartbreak to "Two out of Three Ain't Bad" and sly humor to "Paradise by the Dashboard Light." There's no discounting the production of Todd Rundgren, either, who gives Steinman's self-styled grandiosity a production that's staggeringly big but never overwhelming and always alluring. While the sentiments are deliberately adolescent and filled with jokes and exaggerated clichés, there's real (albeit silly) wit behind these compositions, not just in the lyrics but in the music, which is a savvy blend of oldies pastiche, show tunes, prog rock, Springsteen-esque narratives, and blistering hard rock (thereby sounding a bit like an extension of Rocky Horror Picture Show, which brought Meat Loaf to the national stage). It may be easy to dismiss this as ridiculous, but there's real style and craft here and its kitsch is intentional. It may elevate adolescent passion to operatic dimensions, and that's certainly silly, but it's hard not to marvel at the skill behind this grandly silly, irresistible album.

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