Bulletboys – Acid Monkey (1995)

From the shelves

I usually love it when artists branch out of their comfort zone. Regardless of the results, which can obviously be good or bad, I can appreciate the bold move, the will to take a risk. It’s one of the things art is supposed to be about, after all.

I mean, I love Guns N’Roses’ ‘Appetite for Destruction’, but you can’t recreate that. And if you try, you’ll come up with a bland, faded copy of the original. That’s why I think both the ‘Use Your Illusion’ records and ‘Chinese Democracy’ are brilliant at steering away from that formula. Of course, going off the beaten path can sometimes lead to a bad fall. That usually depends on why you are doing it. When Mötley Crüe got John Corabi on board and came out with their excellent self-titled album, you could hear they really wanted to push their boundaries and prove they were more than just sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll. People didn’t embrace it, but that doesn’t make the music any less interesting.

Then you have those who tried the shift in style just because the music they were known for suddenly went out of fashion. This, unfortunately, doesn’t always work. Ask BulletBoys. They found some success during the late years of hair metal (‘Smooth Up In Ya’ was all over MTV at the end of the ’80s) and, over the course of three albums—1993’s ‘Za Za’ would be my favorite—refined their style towards a very good brand of bluesy hard rock.

Unfortunately, during the grunge era, most of the ’80s bands were seen as has-beens, and BulletBoys answer to the times they are a-changing was a half-renewed line-up, flannel shirts, and a huge piece of, uhm, bad music titled ‘Acid Monkey’, independently released via Swordholio/Perris after the band got dropped by Warner Bros. 30 mins of dull, underproduced (by any standards) punk rock that sounded mouldy in 1995, let alone now. Even the song titles are lame: ‘Diss’? ‘Weazal’? ‘Surf Dog’? Gimme a break. The only two decent tunes are ‘Thorn’, a sort of post-grunge ballad, and a cover of Don McLean’s ‘American Pie’, possibly their attempt at replicating what Ugly Kid Joe did with Harry Chapin’s ‘Cats In The Cradle’ a couple of years earlier.

BulletBoys’ output would be hit or miss after this: while they scored some very good albums (like 2015’s ‘Elefanté’), the not-so-good ones were still better than the low point here. The line between a bold move and senseless bravado can be very thin sometimes.

If, for some reason, you really feel you need it, ‘Acid Monkey’ was released on vinyl in 2025 on Cleopatra Records, along with other titles from the band’s later years.