Tin Machine – Tin Machine

this was supposed to be a full band collaboration and not a bowie record. nobody cares.

my bowie collection is, to say the least, incomplete; the obvious conclusion drawn from a quick look over it is inaccurate. i'm very much opposed to what bowie did in the 80s, but i'm also very much opposed to what he did in the mid 70s, there are quite a few records of his that i like quite a bit and don't own a copy of and i'm not even that keen on a lot of the records that i do have. see, my father has copies of most of the strong discs from the seventies and i was mostly listening to bowie in my teens, as was he, so why would i have bothered buying copies of them myself? i don't honestly foresee myself going on a bowie spending spree; i will probably actually inherit the older discs and you'll all have to wait for that, which hopefully will be quite a long wait.

i'd have to split bowie's work up into alternating stages of brilliance and boringness; the eras i greatly enjoy are his initial records, his work with the spiders, the berlin trilogy (and bleeding over a bit, with decreasing levels of zeal up to scary monsters) and the string of records between outside and hours. the key thing that separates great bowie from mediocre bowie appears to be who he's working with. ronson, garson, fripp, eno, plati and gabrels were able to pull out his best side whereas alomar, visconti and others tended to be less successful in doing so. i may even go so far as to say that i'm actually more interested in eno, ronson, fripp and plati and happen to enjoy the collaborative work that they did with david bowie.

this is really an awful disc, as bad as anything in the bowie back catalogue. the general sound is rooted in american blues, which is not a genre i'm opposed to, in general; however, i need the blues to be a hell of a lot more interesting than this. fans of the blues will tell you that the archetypal nature of the blues is a feature and not a bug because it allows you to focus on the individuality of the musicians and not on the compositions themselves. i do accept this argument; applying it to this disc leaves the disc in dire straits. it would have probably been naive to expect the focus to be anything other than bowie, which means that there aren't any in depth individualistic exploratory exercises around any of the contributors except for him. so, if the point is to explore and the disc doesn't explore is it fair to say that the disc has completely missed the point of the blues?

speaking of missing points, don't get me started on the disco-funk version of working class hero, which is not something to dance about (unless you're emma goldman. maybe.).

how's the guitar playing? well, it's not bad, but it's disappointing; gabrels is not a talented player so much as he's a strange player and his playing really only hits high points when it's contrasted against something out of place. if you want a comparison, think of the less focused moments of stevie ray vaughn, less focused both in technical detail and in interest in orthodoxy. there's a bit of trower in there, too. it would probably be impossible to give him 14 tracks and have nothing interesting come out of it, but don't pick this up looking for brilliant guitar work.

somehow, the production is atrocious. this should be shocking given the artist, but you have to keep the date in mind; it was right before the alternative rock upheaval and it's consequently not remotely surprising, given the artist.

i'm not sure if bowie ever figured out that he absolutely requires a unique and otherworldly backdrop to be effective because he continued to sporadically release these kinds of largely boring records throughout his career. while there are flashes of the spiders in here, and it consequently may appeal to fans of 1970, in general, this is ultimately a largely generic blues disc, and one that was consciously constructed that way, and i must say that was really just asking for trouble.