From Chuck Eddy's book, "Stairway to Hell: The 500 Best Heavy Metal Albums in the Universe,"
32. Electric Angels "Electric Angels" This quartet straddles mascara and Mad Dog camps like the Stones and the 'Smith once did, like Guns N' Roses still do. They're wimps at heart, craftsmen who offset sweet spirit with poison puns: "While we were makin' out you were makin' out my will"; "She became Kryptonite and left me paralyzed"; "There's a hole in my head where the pain gets in."
Electric Angels act like their idea of classic boogie is Elton John's Rock of the Westies, and though Tony Visconti's production (especially the bottom end) could afford to be more dense and though I wish the combo would update their garage with a few Kix/Lepstyle synths, they use the history of pop like the New York Dolls did on their first LP, like Death of Samantha does on Where the Women Wear the Glory and the Men Wear the Pants. It's not smug enough for "postmodernism" thank God; suffice it to say that the disc's littered with allusions (to Baba O'Riley," "You Shook Me All Night Long," "Every Rose Has Its Thorn," the Pistols' "Submission," 999's "Homicide," U2, the Drifters, Judy Garland, Robert Deniro, Marilyn Monroe, Mona Lisa), and they feel like apparitions
In " I Live For the City," Cheap Trick rewrite "One in a Million" minus Axl's bile; in "The Drinking Song," the '83 Replacements come back from the dead, drunk off their rears.
Though eventually displaced when GnR debuted "Civil War" at Farm Aid IV, "Cars Crash" and "True Love and Other Fairy Tales" were the first best rock songs of the nineties.
The former wraps a sadistic Mott the Hoople fuzztone around a crackling voice who hears a siren and worries if his sweetheart is hurt, and from there acoustic ripples and ascending harmonies take him to a place too perfect for words, except maybe the somersaultingly sardonic words here: "Can't say I wish you were dead/Some things are better left unsaid."
And "True Love"'sa majestic five-minute epic, a distant descendant of Dylan's "Desolation Row." The carpet's got holes in it, Jill's on the pill, so Jack ditches her then hitches up with Little Boy Blue (that's the "fairy" part).
There's five violins, two violas, and two cellos, and when I hear 'em I pump up the thermostat