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The preacher and his past?

O. Buxton | Highgate, UK | 11/13/2000

(4 out of 5 stars)

"OK, up front: I was a big Bowie nut, so this album was bound to find sympathetic ears on either side of my head. It did, and I listened to this album a lot. At the time it got bunked badly in the press, and generally got a really bad rap. Here's why:It's 1989: The whole world, not without justfication, is on a Bowie downer following the release of the sell-out Let's Dance followed by a couple of surreal, faux-theatric lemons in quick succession. Everyone's saying, hey, Bowie, cut out this rubbish; just get a band of guys together and play some real rock and roll, like the old days. Ignoring the fact that that's not what the old days were like (well, when did Bowie ever play straight, stripped back rock'n'roll with a bunch of guys?) that's exactly what he did in Tin Machine. No enormous glass spiders; no heavily made up screaming lord byrons here - just good, honest rock'n'roll. And he got crucified, critically and commercially, for it. Thanks, Joe Public!The record is certainly not perfect, and it's not hard to see how it failed to win over a skeptical public. And it didn't really help itself by being half an hour too long, and unfathomably indulgent in a musical sense: far too many of the songs devolve into unstructured - and untalented - jams, a product of Bowie deliberately shunning the spotlight in a futile attempt to prove this really was a band he just happened to be in. Correctly, no-one believed this at the time, and not even Bowie has tried to pretend it since. Now maybe Bowie really did rate Reeves Gabrel as a virtuoso guitar player (he kept him for the best part of a decade after Tin Machine folded), but to my mind Gabrels was allowed far too much lattitude in this band: where the album goes off the rails is whenever Bowie stops singing and Gabrels commences his industrial strength caterwauling on lead guitar. Gabrels is certainly adept at creating disconcerting noises, but it adds only white noise to the product, and probably led to the album being mis-sold as heavy metal, which it isn't, thus meaning neither metal fans nor the general public would buy it. Which is a pity, and left it in the sale racks to the army of Bowie-nuts.Thing is, when the songs are good, they're fantastic. Shorn of thirty minutes of dud songs and instrumental indulgence this would be a truly terrific record; on here there are some songs as good as Bowie ever has produced: imagine a single album with Heaven's in Here, Prisoner of Love, I Can't Read, Under The God, Amazing, Bus Stop, Run and Baby Can Dance, together with the storming 4/4 take on Lennon's Working Class Hero, and you have as good a Bowie album as I can think of. Anyway, that's not how it was sold, and this turned out not to be the commercial return everyone hoped. But for the party faithful, it was a very good sign that normal service (if "normal" is a word you could ever apply to David Bowie) would be resumed shortly."

This deserves another chance

Tony | 10/21/1999

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Yes,Reeves Gabrels strangles his guitar all through the album.Yes,David's voice is buried in the mix.Yes,the rhythm section,the Sales brothers,is solid and tight.Yes the lyrics are a little on the weak side.Well guess what ? It's still one great rock album,I don't know why but it reminds me of David's Station To Station album,but less funky.It doesn't try to be Ziggy-metal and it doesn't suggest "let's dance".I am not familiar with Tin Machine 2,so I can't say it's better or worse,but I will say this is a great attempt at hard rock by Mr. Bowie and if you go back through all of his records,you'll find that the music he made with the late great Mick Ronson was the best of his career.This is a great album of actual rock music that unfortunately got lost in the shuffle in 1989.Why Paula Abdul and Milli Vanilli made it big I don't know.If you like honest and simple rock music then I am honored to be the first person (and Bowie fan) to recommend this to you."

Okay, here's a funny story.

Jeff Hodges | Denton, TX United States | 12/02/2000

(3 out of 5 stars)

"Setting, 1989: I had read that there was supposed to be a new "Power Station" album (you know...."Bang a Gong"), and that David Bowie was going to be the new lead singer. I knew that Robert Palmer hadn't toured with them, so I figured that there was some sort of problem. I kinda liked the idea of the idea the guy who sang "Let's Dance" (which was all I knew about Bowie at the time) singing for Power Station, so I was on the lookout. So when it came out, I figured that there was some sort of legal crap that kept them from using the Power Station name, but I recognized Bowie, so I bought it. Well, it turns out that Tin Machine was recorded at "The Power Station" (I misread the article) and that was about as far as the relationship between the two bands went. It probabaly had the dirtiest lyrics of any of the albums I had, so that helped. Regardless, I was a senior in High School with a penchant for listing to wierd music that no one else listened to (think Rush, Yes, Marillion, and occaisionally Sinead O'Connor's "The Lion and the Cobra").So, without any preconcieved notions, I got into Tin Machine. Everyone thought I was nuts. This girl I was going out with asked me what kind of crap I was making her listen to, but I didn't understand what she didn't like! Reeves Gabriels was great. He played like a crazy man! It was the guy from "Modern Love"! Didn't he sound different? Man, I din't know he was so versatile! Those Sales brothers grooved like crazy! They have some blood harmony or somethin'! Really? I LIKE this song...etc....Eventually, I graduated and went to college and bought Tin Machine II, but that's another story...Anyhow, I broke Tin Machine out this evening, totally at random. You know what? It still rocks. I admit, parts of it sound like my friends probably heard it. But knowing what I know about Bowie now because of this album, I know its just another one of Bowie's incarnations. As always, he gets the opportunity to capture something that he did not get to express elsewhere. If nothing else, pairing the intellectually controlled insanity of Gabriels with a couple of gorilla groovers like the Sales brothers on some post-glam-rocky pop rock makes Bowie a hero in my book. I don't know if I suggest the album or not. I wouldn't break it out at your next Thanksgiving dinner, but if you're feeling open-minded, give it an honest listen. It's in no way perfect, but it definitely has a middle finger pointed somewhere."