Special Album Review: Spinal Tap’s Rock and Roll Creation

This is a new one for me: a review of something that doesn’t even exist.

I have responded to the call of two fellow rock fans—Ben of "My Daily Review" and Metal Mark of "Heavy Metal Time Machine"—in a possibly unprecedented effort to nearly simultaneously review three albums by Spinal Tap, the greatest rock band that never was. Please check out their reviews of Brainhammer and The Sun Never Sweats.

Without further ado, here is my fake review of the fake Spinal Tap album from 1977, Rock and Roll Creation.

Once each decade or so, an album takes the rock world by storm with its musical virtuosity and lyrical genius.

Spinal Tap’s Rock and Roll Creation is NOT that album.

In fact, it’s hard to call this ostentatious fusion of heavy metal, religious imagery, and sophomoric sexual allusion an album at all. Rock and Roll Creation is better described as the soundtrack to the level of Hell that even Dante didn’t dare describe.

Trying to locate bright spots on this record is like searching for buried treasures in your backyard—they may be there, but you’ll have to look really, REALLY hard to find them … and you’ll uncover a lot of shit in the process.

The album’s least vomit-inducing song is the title track, the only one on the record preferable to shaving one’s testicles with a rusty scalpel. Tap’s co-founder and lead singer, David St. Hubbins, growls lines like “Ying was searching for his yang/And he looked and saw that it was good.” One hopes that St. Hubbins is referencing Eastern philosophy’s tenets of self-awareness and balance, but it is far more likely that he is simply imagining a man named “Ying” who admires his own penis.

Spinal Tap’s morbid hybrid of sexual innuendo and quasi-spiritual phrases weigh down the album's other tracks, like “Young, Smug and Famous.” The band’s label says the album was originally titled The Gospel According to Spinal Tap. That name would have better described the bulk of the album, which indeed should be lost for centuries in the nether regions of a nameless desert.

The most positive thing to say about this vomitorium of sound is that it at least attempts hard rock—more than can be said for its immediate Tap predecessors: Back for the Rent, the band’s first, and thankfully last, contribution to glitter rock; and Tap Dancing, Tap’s equally horrid stab at glam dance music. Rock and Roll Creation fails miserably ... but it’s tempting to give the band a D- for effort.

So take this reviewer’s advice: Buy this album.

Then smash it, burn it, and bury the ashes deep in your backyard so it will never see the light of day again.