Product Description

What a great idea: put Eddie and Jim Steinman back togetheragain. Write some songs that sound like the 25-million-selling Bat Out Of Hell and call it . . . For once, whoever conceived this marketing plan was absolutely spot on. The time was right and the songs, while not up to the famous parent, were good. The lead single, "I'd Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That)", featured an expensive video using a Beauty And The Beast theme. It helped to sell the album, but no other track on the album had quite the same power. They all sounded like Steinman/Meat Loaf songs.

Track Listing

1. I'd Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That)
2. Life Is A Lemon And I Want My Money Back
3. Rock 'n' Roll Dreams Come Through
4. It Just Won't Quit
5. Out Of The Frying Pan (And Into The Fire)
6. Objects In The Rear View Mirror May Appear Closer Than TheyAre
7. Wasted Youth
8. Everything Louder Than Everything Else
9. Good Girls Go To Heaven (Bad Girls Go Everywhere)
10. Back Into Hell
11. Lost Boys And Golden Girls

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1892 in Music
• Released on: 1993-09-06
• Number of discs: 1

Amazon.co.uk Review
At a certain point, bad taste and bombast becomes so excessive and so grandiose that they're no longer an easily dismissed irritation but an astonishing monument to the warped imagination. Such a monument is Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell, the long-delayed sequel to 1977's Bat Out of Hell. Once again songwriter/producer Jim Steinman has isolated high-school parking-lot aphorisms and inflated them to Wagner-on-Broadway proportions, casting Mr. Loaf as a heavy-metal Ezio Pinza. Typical of the album's strategy is its big hit single, "I'd Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That)". Steinman piles on the guitars, drums, synthesizers, and choral voices as if he were Phil Spector producing Kiss playing the Who songbook. The rest of the album tackles the themes of teenage lust, frustration, and rock & roll fantasies in similar fashion. It's somehow beside the point to complain about the puerile lyrics, the leaden rhythms, the derivative melodies, the histrionic vocals, or the overblown arrangements. Steinman knows how to push his audience's buttons, and with Meat Loaf's help, he hits those buttons with a sledgehammer. --Geoffrey Himes

From Amazon.com
At a certain point, bad taste and bombast becomes so excessive and so grandiose that they're no longer an easily dismissed irritation but an astonishing monument to the warped imagination. Such a monument is Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell, the long-delayed sequel to 1977's Bat Out of Hell. Once again songwriter/producer Jim Steinman has isolated high-school parking-lot aphorisms and inflated them to Wagner-on-Broadway proportions, casting Mr. Loaf as a heavy-metal Ezio Pinza. Typical of the album's strategy is its big hit single, "I'd Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That)." Steinman piles on the guitars, drums, synthesizers, and choral voices as if he were Phil Spector producing Kiss playing the Who songbook. The rest of the album tackles the themes of teenage lust, frustration, and rock & roll fantasies in similar fashion. It's somehow beside the point to complain about the puerile lyrics, the leaden rhythms, the derivative melodies, the histrionic vocals, or the overblown arrangements. Steinman knows how to push his audience's buttons, and with Meat Loaf's help, he hits those buttons with a sledgehammer. --Geoffrey Himes

Customer Reviews

Pure rock genius!
MeatLoaf + Jim Steinman = a must have album!

I'm a huge fan of MeatLoaf and have been for nearly 10 years and hearng this album for the first time blew me away. "Bat 2" blasts along for well over an hour with pure rock genius. Jim Steinman's song writing really works well with MeatLoaf's style of singing.

It's a worthy following to "Bat 1" so-much-so that it won a grammy!

If you're a MeatLoaf fan you would be mad not have this in your collection. If you're not...you don't know what you've been missing all this time!!

Good but not as good as the first.
Meatloaf is again on top form and I suppose that with the success of Bat out of Hell there had to be a follow up. While it follows the same premise as the first it lacks the originality that made Bat out of Hell so good. Yes there are some fantastic tracks and the rock opera works well, but I can't help feeling that it was written because the first did so well they felt they had to do another. Some of the trachs, like the first album, have been released on their own and several have been covered by other artists. 4 stars given because it doesn't quite reach the heights of its predecessor but otherwise it would have been 5.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into hell!
Seven years after his previous album and 15 years after the legendary 'Bat Out Of Hell', he's back! And not only that, he's back with Steinman. It's a great album, of course, and puts him back where he should be at his own special niche in rock music. 75 minutes of very long songs (almost 12 minutes for the opener; the highly successful version released as a single was a lot shorter, and perhaps, arguably, more effective?, great big overblown, bombastic, revved up, no holds barred, turn it right up, rock opera. It's as if he never was forced into releasing an album or two in the interim which weren't quite as, well, Meaty. The album cut across the generations: thirty-somethings and teenagers were listening to it. In spite of its power, this album does not quite capture the spirit and magic of the original. Also, most songs were not new; many had been recorded previously by Uncle Jim himself on 'Bad For Good' and also by his own ensemble of foxy femmes fatales known, albeit briefly, as 'Pandora's Box'. But it is an album which can be loved until hell itself freezes over. Or at least until October 2006.