Right on time for Halloween, America`s most notorious Zombie decided to unleash his new album The Sinister Urge upon the world. Backed by guitarist Blasko and drummer Mike Tempestra, he also found famous personalities as DJ ... and Ozzy Osbourne willing to lend their helping hand on already his second album since the White Zombie split.

Unfortunately, neither of these people helped inproving the album above the first one, and as a matter of fact, The Sinister Urge is even a few notches below Hellbilly Deluxe. The tones of the intro ("Sinners Inc") are hopeful, but after that the album drops like a brick in the ocean. It is obvious that since the demise of White Zombie Rob has been a bit creatively impaired, but that is no excuse to spit out such bland and mediocre songs as "Dead Girl Superstar", "Never Gonna Stop", "Iron Head" or "Feel So Numb". Apart from the two excellent orchestrated intro/interludes, the aforementioned "Sinners Inc" and "Transylvanian Transmissions Pt 1" there are only four songs worth your attention, two that can be labelled `above average` ("Demon Speeding" and "Scum Of The Earth") and two songs that rank high above the rest of the shit on this album.

Interestingly enough, these two songs are also the songs that sound the least like Rob Zombie; "(go to) California", in all its funkyness seems to have walked away from a Thrill Kill Kult album, while the long and [meeslepende] "House Of 1000 Corpses" seems to have lended more than a few tones from electropop mastermind Foetus.

Even so, having said all this, The Sinister Urge will do pretty well in sales-terms, as the `Marilyn Manson-generation` kids will dig this stuff anyway. For me, and many others that grew up with the excellence that was La Sexorcisto and Astro-Creep: 2000, we can only sigh and think back of the time that Zombie created innovative, creepy and intense music.