I’ll start with the album cover: A) Oh no! Spidey’s about to come out!, B) That’s not spider-sense tingling—it’s herpes…, C) John Romita had a long hidden desire to be comic’s Norman Rockwell, D) Spider-Man should be ashamed of letting Aunt May do the decorating for his room, shouldn’t he? or E) Spider-Man has just listened to a concept album about “the story of everyone's favorite web-head.” Sigh, just another day for your friendly neighborhood possible suicide.

Two clefs under normal conditions would imply a panning, but usually the critical qualitative measurement is a very brief and superficial one over everlasting merit. And frankly, Spider-Man: Rock Reflections of a Superhero has none whatsoever—except of course from it’s initial listen. The album, which listens like a demo tape of rejected theme songs for the brief Spider-Man TV show in the last ’70s, is a cheesy, euphoria inducing kitsch masterpiece. It’s that type of album that would only serve as a frivolous expenditure that can only be justified as diversifying the CD collection—like a William Shatner album. But it’s more the album that, if you were at a party and saw it in a friend’s collection, you’d jump at it while yelling “YOU HAVE THIS? THIS IS SO AWESOME!” so all the party’s inhabitants could hear you, and congregate around to enjoy the hours worth of tacky fun. And then, after everyone at said party has relished in the collective stupidity of the album for its 30 minute duration, you’d put the album away, and never ever, ever listen to it again, for the love of God.

The album’s biggest charms come only if you’re familiar with most early issues of The Amazing Spider-Man (the origin, a few initial issues, a Green Goblin story or two, the death of Gwen Stacey), with it relishing in Stan Lee's dry, passionlessly read, failed-Great American Novelist descriptive phrases. Rock Reflections is a reissue of a long out of print cult “classic” that was released in 1975, and it has the distinct School-House Rocks/Saturday morning feeling to show for it. The startling stand-out for the album is the second half of John Palumbo’s “Dr. Octopus,” which apparently Pink Floyd took in heavily before The Wall. (“In a nightmare that violates all convention, he [Spidey] witnesses a gloating Dr. Octopus, at the command of a world-wide rally of his brain-washed disciples!” says Lee in his introductory narration). No other song has anything musically memorable about it—lyrically, though they’re “worth their weight in webbing!” supposedly.

Milan Kundera said kitsch at its conceptual level, is the denial of shit. And make no mistake about it: this album is shit. Pure shit. But it’s the kind of shit that does not deny its kitsch aspect, and furthermore, it embraces it. Unfortunately, Rock Reflections does’t cut it as the definitive tribute to the woesome and burdened life of Peter Parker, the spectacular Spider-Man. I’m afraid we’re just going to have to wait for Neil Young to pull out the stops for that Spider-Man tribute album.