Shout at the Devil

Overview

Shout at the Devil was Mötley Crüe's breakthrough success, bringing them to international attention. The album's title and the band's use of a pentagram brought the band a great deal of controversy upon its 1983 release, as Christian and conservative groups claimed the band was encouraging their listeners to worship Satan.

The album was one of the breakthrough releases of what was to become the 1980s "hair metal" movement, and was very influential in that regard.

Reception

In a contemporary review for The Village Voice, music critic Robert Christgau panned Shout at the Devil and felt the band's commercial appeal lies in false braggadocio on an album that is poor "even by heavy metal standards". Rolling Stone magazine's J. D. Considine found their style of rock music formulaic, innocuous, and unoriginal in his review of the album: "The whole point of bands like Motley Crue is to provide cheap thrills to jaded teens, and that's where the album ultimately disappoints." In The Rolling Stone Album Guide (2004), he later dismissed the band's music as "a distressingly mild-mannered distillation of Kiss and Aerosmith clichés".

AllMusic's Barry Weber was more positive in a retrospective review and viewed Shout at the Devil as their best album, which "displays Mötley Crüe's sleazy and notorious (yet quite entertaining) metal at its best." Canadian journalist Martin Popoff considered Shout at the Devil inferior to Mötley Crüe's debut album, but found its music extremely addictive if unoriginal and called it "punk rocking lobotomy metal". Adrian Begrand of PopMatters called the album a "timeless L.A. metal classic", which "people often forget how dark, how sleazy, how menacing ... really is". In his opinion, it contains the band's best singles and "remains to this day Mötley Crüe's finest hour".

Shout at the Devil peaked at No. 17 on the Billboard 200 album charts. "Looks That Kill" and "Too Young to Fall in Love" were released as singles to promote the album; they peaked at No. 54 and No. 90 respectively on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1984, while "Shout at the Devil" peaked at No. 30 on the Mainstream Rock chart. Shout at the Devil was awarded 4x Platinum (reaching the four million mark in shipments) on May 15, 1997.

2003 remastered edition

In 2003, the band re-issued their albums on their own label Mötley Records, including added bonus tracks from each album's specific era. The bonus tracks of the remastered edition of Shout at the Devil are mainly composed of demos, but include also the previously unreleased song "I Will Survive", which was recorded in the same sessions. The song "Black Widow", included in the Red, White & Crüe compilation, was also recorded and left off this album. The track "Hotter than Hell" was later renamed and re-recorded into "Louder Than Hell" on the Theatre of Pain album. This edition also sports a warning that the album may contain masked backwards messages. This is in reference to Sixx and Lee chanting "Jesus is Satan" as an underdub on the title track.

A limited edition "Mini-LP" Compact Disc version of the album was released in the Japanese market, featuring the original cover that was previously available only on the vinyl LP release.

Mötley Crüe

Additional musicians

Production