Steel Panther have always been a band I tend to stray away from when searching for new music as I know I'm never going to listen to their material enough to justify owning it in the first place. It's not that they suck or that I have a personal hatred for any particular member of the band, it's just that I'm not a big enough asshole to blast their music out my car or sit in private rocking out to what's clearly a massive parody of their own genre. Everything I've heard of the band suggest they have one dimension, maybe two at a push; generic Hair Metal numbers with uninspired lyrics about sex and occasionally power ballads with a bit more thought put into the quality of the lyrical songwriting.
Album opener "Goin' In The Backdoor" is firmly in the first category. The guitarwork may be solid but the structure and rhythm is fairly typical of your bog standard Hair Metal band like Poison or Motley Crue...but mostly Poison. There are plenty of these songs dotted throughout the album such as "Pussy Ain't Free" and "Wrong Side Of The Tracks (Out In Beverly Hills)"; great music, embarrassing lyrics that prevents the song from being likable. However, to the band's credit, they really do get the music just right. You can pick a series of songs from 80s Hair Metal playlists with tracks off this album thrown in random places and they'd blend together perfectly despite there being a 30 year gap in between.
There's also the hint of some musical development as several tracks sound less like Hair Metal B-sides and more like Hard Rock singles. "Anything Goes" still has silly lyrics but the use of synth, David Lee Roth screeches and epic riffs give it a Van Halen-esque quality, along with unwritten KISS tune "I Got What You Want" and "Poontang Boomerang", even if the latter flat out steals the chord sequence from "Blackout In The Red Room" - Love/Hate. There are also tracks clearly taking influence from other Rock outfits from the 70s such as "Walk Of Shame" containing a Joe Perry guitar riff and a cover of Cheap Trick's "She's Tight" rounding the album off nicely.
These are all songs that would've been vastly improved if the lyrics weren't so blatant and crass, even if that is Steel Panther's entire shtick. They should've taken a page out of Tenacious D's book and released two versions of the album; one with the original lyrics and one with clean ones that sound much funnier when you're left to imagine what they're actually singing. Sure, this could be seen as them selling out to get more radio play but they are Hair Metal. When was the last time you heard a great Hair Metal album that wasn't written with the intent of raking in cash and pussy?
Some tracks are just about passable on the lyrical front, such as power ballad "That's When You Came In". You can justify crude lyrics if they're presented in a relatively innocent or tongue-in-cheek way (see "Christmas Time (Don't Let The Bells End)" - The Darkness or the heavier Cheap Trick songs) as opposed to flat out singing about how much you like the feel of your dick in someone's arse. You can call me a prude but it's not a matter of me finding the lyrics distasteful; they're just not funny anymore. There's only so long the joke can go on for and four albums in, it's getting pretty fucking stale.
"Wasted Too Much Time" is a good example of where the band succeed and fail all in one song. If you've never heard Steel Panther before and listen just up to the first minute, it has the power to be hilarious. It starts off like a Hair Metal power ballad and you think it's going to be another break-up song with cringe-worthy lyrics but then it gets to the chorus and it sounds like a funny take on all those godawful heartbreak hymns. It would be a great joke if used as a snippet in a comedy film, just like This Is Spinal Tap did with select tracks. However, just like many tracks from This Is Spinal Tap, it can't stand up on its own feet when presented as an actual song.
Similar to how earlier albums experimented with branching into Whitesnake and Warrant style songs, Lower The Bar takes more of a plunge into Hard Rock territory but without toning some of the lyrics down, it's all for naught. However, this is the catch-22 of Steel Panther. Their entire appeal is the over-the-top nature of their lyrics paired with well written Hair Metal/Hard Rock music. If they change the foundations of their music, they risk losing fans without standing out enough to gain new ones but if they remain the same for another four albums, they also risk losing fans to bands that are adapting and challenging themselves to make new, exciting material.
Steel Panther need to make a decision as to whether they want to risk losing elitist fans by going more commercial, continue treading water whilst hoping for the best or push the parody even further by creating an entire mythology for the band and releasing a "90s Hair Metal album" that signifies their "decline", only with better music and cleverer lyrics. I don't see that happening any time soon, though, so I guess we can expect another balls to the wall record with fast paced songs about fingering, 69ing, sex addiction and Nutella sandwiches (the sex act, not the food. Don't look it up; you've been warned).
I rate this album 5/10 for having some pretty sweet tunes, marred by off-putting lyrics though they may be. However, I can't bring myself to say that Lower The Bar is anything better than average and would only recommend this to fans of Steel Panther or Hair Metal music as opposed to Hair Metal songs. Also imbeciles who can hear the same joke hundreds of times and piss themselves laughing with every delivery of the word "cock", provided they can stomach the sound of 80s Rock instead of their usual musical diet of dubstep, chart music and The Killers.
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