"A few blocks away a teenage girl plays Russian roulette with her daughter/Is this the best that we can do?" Nikki Sixx asks. Apparently, it's the best he can do: The Mötley Crüe bassist clearly poured his heart and soul into this unburdening album (a companion to his new "rock and roll self-help book"). Nikki shouts at personal and societal devils over ballad-rock sturm and drang that tries for Springsteen but ends up at Meat Loaf fronting Nickelback. You feel for him, just not enough to sit through a celebrity culture-is-evil screed called "Lies of the Beautiful People."

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“The Everchanging Spectrum of a Lie”

The opener off the Welsh group’s The Big Roar album was an epic one, but the band was worried that track had polarized fans. “The first song is eight minutes long,” Rhydian Dafydd, the Joy Formidable bassist, said. “If you did that in the Seventies people would be, ‘Whatever.’ You do it now, people think, ‘Holy s---!’ Some people think it’s the f---ing greatest track on the entire album, and some people think it’s f---ing boring. It’s that element of needing to challenge people.” The band concluded through the song’s lyrics that love was the “everchanging spectrum of a lie.”