The Cult has always had a fan base much greater than their talents would demand. I attribute this phenomenon to the hypnotic powers of Ian Asbury's hair.

Oh sure, you can be all coy about it these days, when you're all grown up and "over all that teenage shit", but back in the day, yeah, you wanted Ian Asbury's hair. Don't pretend you didn't. You're not fooling anyone.

It's not something to be ashamed of. Everyone wanted his hair. Even women wanted his hair. His hair was that damned cool. And the video to Fire Woman and Edie (Ciao Baby!) just made it all the more so.

And they did use the word "ciao" in a song title, albeit parenthetically. So that was pretty damned cool too.

But, they're still over populated with fans, I think.

I never could figure out how they had so many different kinds of fans. I mean, when I was in high school, running around the late '80s with all my metal-head friends, everyone liked The Cult. 'Cause they rocked, and the hair hypnotized us all. But then I got to college and found out all of my previous tastes were terribly wrong and inappropriate, affording me no cred whatsoever. Yet all of my new friends still liked The Cult. How could The Cult co-exist alongside Billy Bragg in a CD collection?

That is a question I still have not answered to this day.

Anyway, The Cult has released a new CD. You probably knew that by now, but we like to cover all the bases.

The Cult has a new CD out, called Beyond Good and Evil. The name itself, just dripping with so much pretense as to make you gag, might have been a warning, but oh well, we take these chances. The existence of a new CD might lead a clever monkey to think the band has a new CD's worth of material.

Clever monkeys are often wrong.

The Cult actually have enough material for an EP; five songs, to be exact. Tracks 1 through 5 on the CD for your convenience. Good stuff those five songs, although track 1 War (The Process) could do without the parenthetical goofiness. War would have sufficed. You're not going to confuse a Cult song with that hippy anti-war anthem ("Good Gawd, ya'll!") anyway. These five songs sound a lot like Fire Woman and Edie (Ciao, Baby!), which is to say they sound like The Cult that you might remember fondly from MTV.

Unfortunately all of the rest of the tracks, tracks 6-12 to be precise, sound uncomfortably like all the other Cult songs that filled out those mid-to-late-80s CDs. The ones you don't remember, because they didn't make MTV, but that I now recall fast-forwarding through to get back to Fire Woman and Edie (Ciao, Baby!). And that's way too close to Bon Jovi than anyone should be going in the year 2001, leaving the clever monkey from above to complete the oblique song lyric reference in a double-entendre of relation to this CD, specifically "What is it good fo'? Absolutely nothin'!"

Say it again!

Luckily enough, though, Ian Asbury cut all of his hair off, which means the world might not be hypnotized so easily this time.

Ciao baby.