Astro-Creep: 2000
| Astro-Creep: 2000 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
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| Studio album by | ||||
| Released | April 11, 1995 | |||
| Recorded | September–December 1994 | |||
| Studio | NRG (Los Angeles) | |||
| Genre | ||||
| Length | 52:01 | |||
| Label | Geffen | |||
| Producer | Terry Date | |||
| White Zombie chronology | ||||
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| Singles from Astro-Creep: 2000 | ||||
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| Audio | ||||
| "Album" playlist on YouTube | ||||
Astro-Creep: 2000 – Songs of Love, Destruction and Other Synthetic Delusions of the Electric Head (sometimes informally referred to as simply Astro-Creep 2000) is the fourth and final studio album by American heavy metal band White Zombie, released on April 11, 1995, by Geffen Records. Adding more industrial textures and disturbing subject matters to the groove metal and alternative metal foundation of the band's previous album, La Sexorcisto: Devil Music Volume One (1992), it is their only record with John Tempesta on drums.[2][3]
White Zombie's most commercially successful album, Astro-Creep 2000 peaked at No. 6 on the Billboard 200 with the aid of hit singles "More Human than Human" and "Super-Charger Heaven". With over 2.6 million copies sold in the US, it was certified double-platinum and nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Engineered Album, but lost to Tom Petty's Wildflowers (1994).[4]
Production
[edit]The album was highly anticipated due to the surprise success of the band's previous release La Sexorcisto: Devil Music Volume One. Ivan DePrume, the band's long-time drummer, had left the band to start Burningsound studios during their touring sessions for that album. The band later recruited former Exodus and Testament drummer John Tempesta for the recording of this album. The album had help from significant industrial musicians, such as the keyboard work from Charlie Clouser, who had worked with artists like Nine Inch Nails, Rammstein, Marilyn Manson, Killing Joke, and more. They had also hired Terry Date (Deftones, Pantera, Soundgarden) to produce Astro-Creep: 2000 for them. According to J., the album comprises seventy-two track recordings, forty-eight of which are analog and twenty-four being digital recordings.[5] For the album, the band had a much bigger recording budget and more freedom in time.
The entire album took three months to write and another three to record. Writing for the album began in June 1994, shortly after White Zombie finished touring Japan.[6] Recording was scheduled to commence in September 1994,[7] and the album was finished by Christmas 1994.[6]
Music and lyrics
[edit]The album is much heavier than La Sexorcisto and has been called "white-trash-on-acid metal" by Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic.[8] The band also down-tuned the guitars and bass to give it the darker sound that the songs required, going from standard E tuning to dropped C# (3 semitones below E standard).[citation needed]
Much of the lyrics are also darker and more disturbing than on the previous album, and are arranged more like twisted poetry than La Sexorcisto's pseudo-rap scores, dealing with murder, the undead, blasphemy, and satanic elements.[citation needed]
As with the previous two albums, many of the songs feature snippets of dialogue from horror and cult films including The Omega Man, Shaft, The Haunting, The Curse of Frankenstein and To the Devil a Daughter. The titular refrain of "More Human Than Human" is taken from the 1982 film Blade Runner.[9]
Rob has said he favors this album to the previous one, stating, "I was never that happy with it [La Sexorcisto]. In some respects, it was probably the best thing we could do at the time under the circumstances; and that this record was exactly what we wanted it to sound like."[10]