Steel Panther: All You Can Eat

West Coast jokers face a stiff challenge

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It’s no coincidence that the creators of both Fawlty Towers and The Office, two of the most influential and beloved sitcoms in history, decided to shelve the shows after their second series, Messrs Cleese and Gervais believing the joke starts to wear thin on the third hearing. So what does this mean for the third Steel Panther album?

Well, you’ll already know what you’re going to get musically: perfect glam-metal stompers lifted straight from the Sunset Strip circa 1985, with the ludicrous levels ramped up to 110 per cent. But the question is: can Steel Panther deliver the ‘megalolz’ now we’re all aware the punchline is coming?

Sadly, they can’t. You can telegraph the lyrical content to songs like She’s On The Rag and Bukakke Tears before you’ve even heard them. The whole bawdy ‘Oooh matron!’ shtick has been stretched to breaking point further than one of the Panther’s earliest groupies. Luckily they truly are an excellent group of musicians and the chorus to B.V.S. and the guitar riff to Pussywhipped are good enough to delight your average arena rock fan.

Lesser bands would be long forgotten by now with this approach. Luckily for Steel Panther, they’re still better than all their peers.

Stephen Hill

Since blagging his way onto the Hammer team a decade ago, Stephen has written countless features and reviews for the magazine, usually specialising in punk, hardcore and 90s metal, and still holds out the faint hope of one day getting his beloved U2 into the pages of the mag. He also regularly spouts his opinions on the Metal Hammer Podcast.