Album Review: Tin Machine, "Tin Machine II"

The Return of the thin White Duke! Yeh, Bowie’s back, albeit under the guise of TIN MACHINE. Tin Machine II is, as you'll have guessed from the title, the second TIN MACHINE album, and starting on a positive note, a slight improvement on their last effort.

What Bowie seems to be attempting with his TIN MACHINE project is a return to the roots, the quintessential spirit of rock and roll. No, not quite Robert Johnson or Bo Diddley, but he now favours, generally speaking, an energized garage band, rock n' roll sound (including a most expensive garage production!) with a contemporary idiosyncratic twist; that twist derived from the left-field rock influences that pepper some of the songs.

Prime examples of that are the thrashy Big Hurt, a frenzied cacophony of noise, where Bowie’s distinctive vocal histrionics become somewhat overwrought. On Goodbye Mr Ed they flirt only half-convincingly with psychedelic-tinged indie rock metal. Whilst Amlapura is in a more airy, dreamy vein and hints that the old codger has been picking his ear up to THE PIXIES and JANE'S ADDICTION of late.

Elsewhere, TIN MACHINE are more convincing when focusing on on straight-down-the-line rock and roll. If There Was Something is a dirty big slab of gritty raunch n’ roll. Stateside is raw-boned n’ bluesy. But the current single You Belong to Rock n Roll promptly bites the dust after a promising start. Then there's the lackluster You Can't Talk, further handicapped by a feeble chorus and an irritating minimalist funk guitar motif.

I'm sure that he had a lot of fun making the record, and he's no boring old fart by any means, but, as far as I'm concerned, it's the songs born out of hunger, passion, and pain that sparkle in the rain.

Tin Machine frankly lack that sparkle.

Grade B-

Mark Liddell
Riff Raff
Sept 1991

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!