Word: guitar
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...MACHINE: TIN MACHINE (EMI). It's David Bowie, lying low with a new band that he helped create and whose rough edges he hones to a good cutting edge. Lots of fever-blister guitar work and apocalyptic Bowie lyrics. Crack City ought to be a sci-fi hallucination, but Bowie knows better: he makes it into an everyday nightmare...
Walking With a Panther has more to it than just unorthodox rhymes, however. LL is at his best when he brags, and the first track of the album, "Droppin' Em," is classic Cool J. The hard, funk-like guitar chord and the heavy, drum beat work well to compliment LL's "I'm hard-as-hell" attitude...
...sights trained on a full-fledged G.O.P. takeover. Working with his political soul mate, Republican National Committee Chairman Lee Atwater, he also wants to see his party recapture the Senate, as well as statehouses and city halls all over the nation. But unlike Atwater, whose blues-playing, guitar-strumming sideswipes can be entertaining, Gingrich approaches his mission with a humorless holier-than-thou style that makes him easy to dislike...
...operative verb here is "as if it were," because no matter what Jackson says, removing the spaces from in between songs does not a song cycle make. Take, for instance, the opener, "Tomorrow's World." It begins promisingly, with breathy vocals sitting side-saddle on a set of naked guitar arpeggios, driven by an obsessive pattern and punctuated by an incredibly satsifying bass drum. Particularly effective, too, are a series of abrupt changes in volume. But just when everything is going well, Jackson screws up the chorus, bigtime in that it destroys the mood of everything that precedes...
...correspondingly non-correspondent meters. The instrumental bridge is a string quartet; the coda is also counched in lush strings, with Askew contributing a haunting, wordless "Madame Butterfly" type aria. This segues into an instrumental, "Acropolis Now," which begins promisingly as a hybrid between '80s rock and Greek folk guitar, but it begins to maunder soon after and degenerates into a fairly close approximation of a jam session by a forgotten, early '70s band. The side closes with the title track, which reverses the problems of the opening cut; a suitably anthemic chorus is surrounded by a song about a "young...