Tin Machine [Original recording remastered]

Tin Machine | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (September 28, 1999)
• Original Release Date: 1989
• Number of Discs: 1
• Format: Original recording remastered
• Label: Virgin Records Us
• ASIN: B00001OH82
• In-Print Editions: MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (37 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #105,644 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Editorial Reviews

Audio CD

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars This deserves another chance, October 21, 1999

By 

Tony - See all my reviews

This review is from: Tin Machine (Audio CD)

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.

32 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars the preacher and his past?, November 12, 2000

By 

O. Buxton "Olly Buxton" (Highgate, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Tin Machine (Audio CD)

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.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the Greatest Albums of the 1980s, November 18, 1999

By 

Marc Szeftel (Seattle, Washington) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Tin Machine (Audio CD)

14 scorching, searing, snarling tracks make up this masterpiece, arguably one of Bowie's finest achievements. Bowie wandered about for a while after the spectacular commercial success of "Let's Dance", and this back-to-basics album was the start of his most self-assured period. Tin Machine rocks harder than just about anything else Bowie has recorded. I've been listening to it for ten years now and it still knocks me cold. Even if you don't think you like Bowie you should listen to this album at least ten times. It will grow on you.