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Wednesday, August 29, 2018

Album Review: Rod Stewart - Camouflage (1984)

Camouflage is a terrible album, the worst I've heard from Rod Stewart and probably one of the worst albums to come out of the 1980s.  There are only two decent songs on this album - "Some Guys Have All The Luck" and "Can We Still Be Friends."  And that's pushing the term "decent" quite a bit.  This certainly feels more like a contract-filler to me - there's just no soul, no motivation to it, nothing.  Dull as ditchwater and almost as entertaining as a group of puritan, conservative housewives discussing the joys of crochet, you'd only buy this if you're an obsessive-compulsive collector or if you think "Some Guys Have All The Luck" has some potential going for it, for which you'd probably be right.  Otherwise, wait until this goes cheap.  The C plus rating I'm giving it is for the aforementioned songs.  There's plenty of vastly superior Rod Stewart albums that you should be listening to, even from his somewhat maligned eighties period.  Hell, give me Every Beat of my Heart any day, and apparently that's rubbish.  Compared to this, however, I'd beg to differ.  C+


Thursday, August 23, 2018

Album Review: Joe Satriani - Surfing With the Alien (1987)

Joe Satriani's Surfing With the Alien is an album I should've reviewed a long time ago.  I had completely forgotten just how good it was and had subsequently consigned it to the admittedly extensive list of albums I only ever listen to every century or so.  Like many albums, I only bought it because it was going cheap.  That, and because it had "Always With Me, Always With You" on it.  A great song, no two ways about that.  But it's certainly not the only great song on the album, as I had found out after giving it a spin three or four times.  And now I'm also digging "Crushing Day", "Hill of the Skull" "Lords of Karma" as well as the staple "Satch Boogie."  Plenty of other good songs here too.  Despite my initially lukewarm reception to this album, I've come to have a great deal of respect for this record.  Even if I do have a tendency to put it away and forget about it completely.  A very nice album indeed.  A-


Monday, August 20, 2018

Album Review: Chris Rea - Wired to the Moon (1984)

I love the music of Chris Rea.  I absolutely love it.  A brilliant singer and songwriter whom I feel is badly underrated and underappreciated.  Ask anybody who even remotely knows who he is and they'll probably tell you, "oh, he's the guy who sings 'Driving Home for Christmas.'" And of course, he is.  Some will say he's the guy who wrote "The Road to Hell (Part 2)." Others may say "oh, I love that song 'Let's Dance.'"  But very few people will tell you just how good Wired to the Moon actually is.  In light of his more successful recordings such as the magnificent On the Beach or the not too shabby The Road to Hell it certainly comes across as a filler album of sorts, something that sold well enough but never reached the chart heights of his magnum opus.  I'd personally like to be the first, if I am indeed the first, to review this album with great appraisal.  There's only song here that ever made his greatest hits compilations, and even then in re-recorded form.  That song is "Ace of Hearts."  A brilliant song, but not the best here.  I would say that accolade goes to the title track "Wired to the Moon."  The first three tracks are the weaker points on this album, but they're not exactly crap, either.  A brilliant album all around. A