• AllMyVinyl #139
• Band: W.A.S.P.
• Album Title: Inside the Electric Circus
• Release Date: 22 Oct 1986
• Date purchased: October 2023
• Location purchased: Gift
• Color of vinyl: black
• Number of discs: 1
• Links: [ Wikipedia | Discogs | Band Website | Complete album on Youtube ]

This is an album that when I saw it coming up on the list of albums in the series, I was kind of not looking forward to.  It’s not that I think it’s a bad album.  I never actively thought it was a bad album, but it’s one that was a “dip” in the band there.  The first two WASP albums were quite good.  The fourth and fifth albums (Headless Children & Crimson Idol) were outstanding.  So you’d figure the third one would be good too?  Not as much.  That’s this one.  “Inside the Electric Circus”.   This album reminds me of the third Megadeth album in a few ways.  That one (“So Far, So Good, So What”) was a dip in quality for that band.  had a great album, a “meh” album, and then a totally killer album after it.  For that album and this one I can think of two songs off the top of my head that I can recall thinking of a song I’d want to listen to intentionally (and one of those is a cover!).  The rest of this album (like that one) is a blank slate for the most part.  This is another album that I am going into remembering little of what’s on it.  Because I have it filed in my memory as “meh”.

I know I bought this back in the day.  But as I sit here in 2025, the only thing I’m sure about is that I never bought it on vinyl.  This came out in the fall of 1986, and I didn’t have a CD player yet (that was Dec 1987).  I was however at the time buying CD’s I found on good prices, figuring I’d be getting a player soon.  It’s probably more likely I bought this on cassette tape though, and I definitely don’t still have that in 2025, but I do have a CD of it – but I can’t recall if it’s an original purchase or something I picked up along the line.  Shows you how I feel about this one, that most of memories of it have disappeared completely.  The copy I’m listening to today was part of the box set I was gifted in 2023 called “W.A.S.P. – The 7 Savage 1984-1992”.  I likely would not own this on vinyl if I wasn’t gifted the box set, I can’t see myself spending the cash to buy this album on its own on vinyl.

Oddly the stuff I do remember I’m just not that excited about going in.  The title track and the cover are songs two and three, and neither of them would rank very high in the list of best WASP songs.  It really is a “meh” album when the two best tracks that I recall would rank near the bottom of a full career spanning WASP playlist.  I’m hopeful I can make a discovery or two in this listen.  I have a few times in the series, but I’m not hopeful.

A note about the band itself here.  3/4 of this is the same band that was on the last album – that being Blackie Lawless, Chris Holmes, & Steve Riley.  There were a few changes, though.  After the first two, they let go of Randy Piper, who played guitar along with Chris Holmes.  They replaced him with Johnny Rod, who played bass.  Rod still played bass, but at the same time, Blackie who was playing bass on the first two albums switched to rhythm guitar, replacing the departed Piper in that regard.  The line up was solid, but as I mentioned before, it didn’t really produce an album I have many good memories of.

The Big Welcome – This is a 1:22 intro track.  It sets the tone of a “circus”.  A real one, as this starts off with “big top” style music, and an announcer like you’d hear over a PA system at a circus talking about “wild ones of all ages..  Step right up… ”  It’s not a traditional piece of music as such.  It’s just an intro piece of the album as a whole.  The tail end of this intro does have some band music – it’s not ALL the “PA announcer”, but it’s definitely an intro piece for sure.  It DIRECTLY leads into the next song (with no break)….

Inside the Electric Circus – As I’ve already established, this album is one I’ve always looked down on or thought just “eh” about.  However, the title track is not one of them.  This is probably the song I enjoy the most from the album.  It’s certainly the one I remember the best.  It has the feel of the first couple of WASP albums for sure.  I actually quite like the echo-y effect at the start of the song before the vocals start.  I have to admit I did listen to this song via Apple Music in my car as well as the vinyl today, and I have to say the Apple music version has a more echo effect to the digital version than I remembered in the past.  The vinyl print doesn’t sound quite like that – Blackie’s vocals seem more in front on my vinyl copy.  I wonder of these were remastered somewhere and I didn’t know about it?  Entirely possible.  Either way this is probably my favorite song on the album.  It’s also where the billed “Circus” concept on the album title and the cover art stops.  After this all that isn’t a thing anymore.

I Don’t Need No Doctor – WASP keeps to tradition by making a cover a single.  They’ve done that through their entire career.  This one is a cover of a 1966 song of the same name by Ray Charles.  It was also popularized by the band Humble Pie.  But it wasn’t until I put this together today that I knew the true original was Ray Charles.  I always thought it was a Humble Pie song.  I was wrong.  As WASP covers go, it’s OK.  I think part of the reason I don’t rank it higher on their extensive list of covers is that the original song doesn’t do a whole lot for me.  It’s just one of those songs you hear,  don’t hate while you’re listening to it, and it just goes away afterwards.  It doesn’t stick with you afterwards.

95-Nasty – The only song I can recall anything about, and that’s because my brother likes it.  That’s about it.  Given their usual subject matter (getting laid), the lyrics here are no surprise.  I do like a bit of the intro guitar riff as the song starts, but overall, it’s just kind of middle of the road as a track.  Has some traditional WASP screeching by Blackie, but guitar wise it’s not the best thing they’ve done.

Restless Gypsy – Yeah, this is the first real example of this album not doing much for me.  Not actively bad, but it sounds like any number of other WASP songs.  Just doesn’t reach out and grab me at all.

Shoot From the Hip – Another one where I liked the opening riff before the lyrics started, but that was about it.  Once the verses start, there’s not a lot going on beyond Blackie’s vocals.  The chorus isn’t super catchy either.  Kind of like 95 Nasty where I liked the opening riff, but the rest of it is the kind of song that I can easily give a pass too.  This was the end of Side 1.  Five songs in, and really only like one of them a lot.

I’m Alive – A good chugging guitar riff starts this off, and fortunately doesn’t die out at the start.  It keeps going.  It’s married with a good riff by (I assume) Chris Holmes.  The chugging background riff carries on through the verses – I like that kind of thing, as it gives the overall song a similar sound that runs through the various parts, but doesn’t sound the same because of the changing parts that are married to it.  I quite like this one, which is a surprise as it strikes me as one of those songs that would stick in my head, but it didn’t.  I know some of the things I’ve said I’ve liked about this song I’ve said about others that I haven’t, but here it works.  Decent (if not stellar) solo in here too.

Easy Living – Most WASP lyrics are Blackie screeching though them (at least in this era).  But this song does something different in that he has some multi-track vocals layered on top of each other where he’s singing with himself.  I liked this one too.  Mostly due to the vocal delivery of the line “Easy Living” in the chorus.  Nice vocal hook for me.  Guitar work OK – not stellar, but even remotely bad either, so a decent enough song.  Another one I’d totally forgotten about.

Sweet Cheetah – Longest song on the album at 5:16.  Musically this sounds like several other WASP songs had their bits picked up and merged into this song.  More than once listening to this one, I found myself thinking “didn’t that bit appear in {other WASP song name}”?  I even thought I heard some background vocal stuff that popped up on the next album too.   Yeah, didn’t care for this one as it just feels like something else the whole time.  Blackie called this entire album “a tired album by a tired band” – I can see that here

Mantronic – The album limps towards the finish with this song.  It does have some slower parts where it fakes out and think it might be a power ballad, but it isn’t, really.  I actually started writing this track note as it if was a power ballad, then it changed gears, and I had to adjust my text.  But like most of the songs on this album, it doesn’t do much for me.  It’s there.  That’s about it.

King of Sodom and Gomorrah – Later on in his career Blackie became a born again Christian, and a lot of his latter era material bears that out (especially the most recent album as of now – 2015’s Golgotha).  Reading the lyrics to this, it doesn’t sound like something that would go on the Golgotha album at all, it feels like it’s coming at the use of Bible stuff in WASP lyrics from the other side of the coin – but given where WASP was as a stage act at this point, it’s not a huge surprise.  Musically it’s like most of this album – just kind of there, doesn’t do a ton for me musically.

The Rock Rolls On – Yeah, another one from the pile of mediocre stuff on this album.   Fortunately it’s the last song.

The band is only one album out from doing killer tracks like Blind in Texas or Wild Child – what the hell happened to that?  I can’t imagine Blackie changing from bass to rhythm and the loss of the old rhythm guitarist would make that much of a difference.  They just don’t sound terribly inspired on this album.  From what I’ve read Blackie considered it his least favorite WASP album, and I can see why.  It’s just kind of there.  After I finish this play, I probably won’t ever listen to it in full again, as it’s a pretty pedestrian album by their standards.  Even some of the lesser more modern WASP albums run circles around this one.

You could probably outright delete easily half the songs on this album, turn it into an EP and it would have the same amount of impact on the overall WASP career catalog with only say 4 or 5 songs on it.  Most of this album is completely forgettable.  I started out writing some negative stuff about the album, and my opinion of it didn’t change when I listened today.  Self perpetuating?  Perhaps, but…

It’s a shame as there’s some absolutely killer albums in the WASP catalog.  This is NOT one of them.