Customer Reviews

Tin Machine

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Gabrels' playing makes the mediocre songs fascinating. Basically the songs are just a background for him to do his thing. The music has a lot of intricacies which is why I am still listening to this album regularly more than a decade after it came out.

Too bad Bowie disbanded the band. Soupy Sales' sons on drums and bass are good too.

Even by the standards of the chameleon-like David Bowie this was an unexpected move: eschewing his increasingly mainstream solo career, forming a hard-rock band to play in small clubs, and recording an album that was less about 'concept' and more about improvisation. That he did so at the end of the 1980s makes it doubly surprising: the sound Tin Machine generated was, depending on how you look at it, 10 years too late or 5-10 years too early. After all, 1989 was the year in which the biggest hits were a weepy from Phil Collins and a power ballad from The Bangles. Enough said. But Bowie always seems to be standing outside of time, when he isn't utterly defining it, so that's hardly a surprise. What is surprising is that the first album that grew out of this experiment was and still is a tremendously enjoyable one. Playful, sharp, by turns stirring and dark, these are 14 hard-rock tracks about love, fame and especially drugs. Energetic guitarist Reeves Gabrels playfully pulls out a dozen classic rock riffs and then invents a few more. The Sales brothers' rhythm section is superb. As always, Bowie's vocals are top-notch. Tim Palmer's production and mixing are a good match for the band: the sound is exceptionally crisp and clear; I like the depth, and the fact that the vocal isn't always foregrounded; Gabrels is clearly the star here, but his playing isn't allowed to overwhelm the others. The surprise hit single "Under the God" still stands up today, as does most of the album. Other standout tracks include "Prisoner of Love" and a particularly savage cover of John Lennon's "Working Class Hero". What I like most about this album is that it sounds like four exceptionally skilled rock musicians having fun together. They don't really care what's popular. They don't really care if we listen. They're just doing what they enjoy - and that always plays.

I really wanted to give it 3 1/2 points, but since that's not possible I'll be generous and give it 4 stars, only because it's not nearly as bad as some would have you believe.

There's some good rock songs here. There's some weak ones. I think part of why this album never took off was that it sounded too much like run-of-the-mill rock n' roll, kinda samey. I thought Bowie's idea to join a group was pretty cool at the time.

The songs that are great:
"Crack City" - a powerful anti-drug song from someone who's been there and back.
"Amazing" - a sweet song with a great melody.
"Bus Stop" "Pretty Thing" and "Video Crime" are great rockers.
"Baby Can Dance" has sexual swagger and may be the best song on the album although it could be considered sexist in places by some.

The songs that work:
"Heaven's in Here" "Prisoner of Love" "I Can't Read" and Lennon's "Working Class Hero"

The rest are pretty weak.

So it is a mixed bag, but the good songs are good enough to heat and the album is certainly a worthy addition to the collection of any Bowie fan.

I don't know why, but Tin Machine never became popular, but they made great music. This is honestly my favorite cd. I thoroughly enjoy every song on it and and none of them ever get old. This cd contains some of the best songs ever written by David Bowie in my opinion. "Amazing" , "Run" and "Bus Stop" are all incredible songs. All of the songs on here are incredible.

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.

On this cd, Bowie didn't do anything creative or musically inventive. All he did was write rock songs...very good ones at that. This is such a great cd and all of the songs are worth a listen. There is no concept or any super deep meaning here, and I guess that's why no one paid attention to this cd, but anyways no cd collection is complete without this. "Prisoner of Love" is most likely the greatest love song ever written. "Bus Stop" is another excellent song and so is "Amazing". This cd rocks harder than any of Bowie's previous albums, and I guess that's why I like it. If you like Bowie and rock n roll, this is a must have.

This is an unfairly maligned album. I've always really liked it. I think it's one of David's best albums, certainly one of the best from the 1980's. It's raw, angry, powerful, and passionate. It feels real. It's not fake, and it's not Bowie trying to act like an angry young man. He's an angry middle aged man here, and he really kicks it. Reeve Gabriels and the Sales Brothers (sons of Soupy Sales) are a great backing band for Bowie. He's written some of his best material here. The title track, Crack City, and Under the God are all bonafide classics. The energy of the band is really cool. I really like Bowie's cover of Working Class Hero here. I think it's as good (if not better) than Lennon's original. I recently listened to the godawful Lennon tribute CD Save Dafur, and Green Day (who I've never really liked anyway) butchered the song. Bowie makes the song his own and respects the original too. I get annoyed at people putting down this album, which is as good as anything Bowie has put out. So it isn't like his 70's work. It's still valid, and it rocks.