Album Review: Richard Marx, "Rush Street"

This album is like a million pound car with every accessory you can imagine, bar one essential part – the engine.

I’m telling ya, there is no soul in this record whatsoever. I mean it's got a great production and the playing is to the highest standard, etc., etc. But that's about it.

The artistic line-up appearing on it is quite stunning: Tommy Lee turns up playing drums on Streets Of Pain, a bit of a basher, with the very distinctive sound of Steve Lukather hurling itself around like a wasp with an attitude problem.

Then we have BILLY JOEL turning up on I Get No Sleep, with again the ever impressive Stevie on git, along with one of the most incredible drummers I’ve ever seen, Terry Bozzio. This is another up-tempo kangaroo with the added colour of a soulish backing vocal provided by Cheryl Lynn and Cindy Mizelle.

A mere smattering of what's been going on. We have LUTHER VANDROSS warbling, Nathan East twanging his bass with remarkable dexterity, and Jeff Pocaro crackin' a few sticks now and again. But enough astrology!

The first single to wiggle free was the totally irritating Keep Coming Back. Believe me, it's like toothache. But there's always Your World. Goo! You don’t really need me to expand, do you? Hazard is full of delicate plucking around and a chorus that will have you humming.

God, I’m bored. Can I go now?

Grade D

Peter Grant
Riff Raff
January 1992

Revenge...?

Riff Raff was a legendary rock magazine based in London in the late 1980s and 1990s. Edited by the ultimate music biz insider, Mark Crampton, and employing such talents as Mark Blake, Jerry Ewing, Mike Harris, Paul Smith, Chris Collingwood, Alan McCrorie, Simon Robinson, Lyn Guy, Anna Marx, Nick Douglas, Marion Garden, Peter "Grunty" Grant, Joe "The Crow" Mackett, Billy "The Kluck" Kulke, and, lastest and mostest, the incredible Liddell Brothers, Mark (a.k.a. "El Perro") and Colin (a.k.a. "Der Fly"). Unfortunately, Riff Raff was just too R n' R for its own good. A genuine working class rock mag, written, edited, and translated into 16 European languages in a drug-N-Jack-D-fuelled haze, often on the back of motorbikes, with spell checking by our staff of attentive rock bimbos (chosen purely for their blondeness and big knockers), it soon fell behind more trainspotterly, nerdish, and politically correct publications like Q, Kerrang, Mojo, Metal Hammer, and Horse & Hound. This website is an archive and kind of shrine dedicated to the writing of its greatest writers, some of whom, luckily for the Rock Kosmos, still continue to write about music. This is the REVENGE of Riff Raff...Rock on!