Blue Oyster Cult Club Ninja CD

Blue Oyster Cult: Donald "Buck Dharma" Roeser (vocals, guitar, keyboards); Joe Bouchard (vocals, guitar, bass); Eric Bloom (vocals, guitar); Tommy Zvoncheck (piano, organ, synthesizer); Jimmy Wilcox (percussion, background vocals).
Additional personnel: Howard Stern (spoken vocals); Phil Grande (guitar); Kenny Aaronson (bass); Tommy Price (drums).
Includes liner notes by Arthur Levy.
Blue Öyster Cult's gradual disintegration continued with Club Ninja, on which original member Allen Lanier was replaced by keyboard player Tom Zvoncheck, and several compositions from outside the band were featured, notably the Leggat Brothers' "White Flags," and a couple of metal exercises by Bob Halligan, who had contributed much the same sort of material to Judas Priest. Sandy Pearlman was back in the producer's chair. ~ William Ruhlmann
Blue Öyster Cult's gradual disintegration continued with Club Ninja, on which original member Allen Lanier was replaced by keyboard player Tom Zvoncheck, and several compositions from outside the band were featured, notably the Leggat Brothers' "White Flags," and a couple of generic metal exercises by Bob Halligan, who had contributed much the same sort of material to Judas Priest. On what should have been the positive side, Sandy Pearlman was back in the producer's chair. But he did nothing to arrest BÖC's decline into musical anonymity. ~ William Ruhlmann
CLUB NINJA reunited BOC with the band's original conceptual guru and producer Sandy Pearlman but, oddly, this didn't signal a return to the band's original template of brainy, self-consciously menacing metal. Instead, the album continued in the vein of the radio-friendly, somewhat generic pop sounds of its predecessor, THE REVOLUTION BY NIGHT. Fortunately, Pearlman did turn the keyboards down a bit, giving the Eric Bloom/Buck Dharma guitar franchise much more space in the mix, and the album does feature what may be the band's best-ever thinking person's party anthem, the inspiringly titled "Make Rock, Not War."