Calling Blue Öyster Cult “the thinking person’s hard rock band” might do their peers a disservice, but it does at least scrape the surface when it comes to setting apart just how out of left field they could be. It helped that they were Noo Yawkers fairly tight with the rockcrit cognoscenti — one of whom, Richard Meltzer, co-wrote a couple of their best cuts here (the ludicrous fame-as-powertrip annihilation boogie “Stairway to the Stars”). But it helped even more that their collective songwriting sensibility was so immediately evocative of the kind of maniacal directness and enthusiasm contained in a more-perceptive-than-usual teenage brain. Depicting Altamont bikers as Lovecraftian horrors (“Transmaniacon MC”), drug deals gone wrong as widescreen Western drama (“Then Came the Last Days of May”), and rock music itself as some kind of A-bomb destructive force (“Cities on Flame With Rock and Roll”) takes a deft touch, after all. And if that touch is made that much more immediate when Eric Bloom snarls those lyrics out and Buck Dharma goes full obliteration mode on guitar, hey, who said the thinking person had to be subtle?

– Nate Patrin