Album Review: Noiseworks, "Love Versus Money"

Ever since I heard their powerful, classy debut album in 1988, I've always believed that world domination was just around the corner for Australian rockers NOISEWORKS. Love Versus Money is the band's third album and it's a deliberate, some might even say contrived, stab at chart success.

This is certainly Noiseworks’ most commercial release. But the funk and Motown influences that now permeate the group's music have resulted in some impressive Hard Rock. "Jealousy (is a Curse)" and the stirring "Burning Cross" are too obvious examples, with John Stevens' strong vocals and Stewart Fraser's chiming guitar aided by the backing of a female choir; something that gives the songs on Love Versus Money a real edge.

Despite other fine moments, including "Day Will Come" and "Don't Lead Me On," the band occasionally flounder. As both the mundane "Hot Chili Women" and a dreary cover of SLY STONE's "Take You Higher" descend into unconvincing white- boy soul; which does the band no favours at all.

That said, there is still enough good material on the album to ensure wider recognition in the very near future.

GRADE B+

Chris Miller

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!