Agents of Fortune

I have mixed feelings about this album. The cover is great, of course. This band has some of the best covers in rock music. And I think about half of the album is really great, the hard rock songs, and some of them are my favorite Blue Oyster Cult songs of all time....This Ain’t The Summer of Love, The Revenge of Vera Gemini and Tattoo Vampire. And both of Donald Roeser’s songs are classics. It’s the more mellow and poppier songs that I don’t like, my least favorite being Al Lanier’s True Confessions, which he also sings. I think Debbie Denise and Tenderloin are pretty bad as well. Morning Final would have been a much better song if they didn’t have that guy at the end selling newspapers. What were they thinking? I still give the album four stars, for the songs that I love and for that great gatefold cover.

c o w b e l l s p o t t e d

Still listen to this song always will !!!

Blue Oyster Cult has always been a bit of an acquired taste for most. Their style defies definition with it’s mix of hard rock, pop, blues, and boogie. The band’s sinister imagery and eclectic song lyrics give most of their stuff a decidedly dark vibe as well. Agents of Fortune was a departure from the band’s three initial “black and white” albums, which were more straight ahead hard rock. Here the muscular guitars of Roeser and Bloom are mixed more prominently with Allen Lanier’s rather excellent keyboards, giving the record a more commercial feel. Songs like This Ain’t the Summer of Love, E.T.I., Sinful Love, and Tattoo Vampire still rock and will appeal to those fans of the the band’s earlier works. The real gems here are the classic rock hit Don’t Fear the Reaper, and The Revenge of Vera Gemini. Both are moody atmospheric numbers with thought provoking lyrics. Great headphone music. While the band would expand the boundaries of their sound even further on later releases, Agents remains a nice bridge between early 70’s and late 70’s BOC and is a good place to start for the novice listener.

"Agents" is justifiably considered BOC's flagship album, as it foregrounds all of the band's dark attributes: cryptic subject matter, sci-fi noir atmospherics, urban paranoia, gloomy mysticism, etc., all presented via some of the most striking and versatile arrangements in mid-70s rock. "Reaper" is the iconic cornerstone track, of course, sinister and sensual--featuring a now infamous wooden block percussive element to indicate horse hoof impacts, erroneously identified as a "cowbell" in an equally infamous SNL skit--but the album contains a wealth of substance and texture beyond this hit, and is expertly sequenced to boot. Check out future National Book Award winner Patti Smith's duet on space Goth trip "Vera Gemini," and decadent proto-metal gem "Tattoo Vampire," a powerhouse track championed by Lars Ulrich of Metallica. "Agents" is vintage Cult: smart, oblique, fascinating, sardonic, unnerving.

Great album just need a little more cowbell!

GOOOOD

I got a fever. And the only prescription... Is more cowbell!

It'll go up when I get more cowbell!!

Every song is listenable and clever.