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Tin Machine (tin machine)

Started by famethrowa, February 17, 2019, 12:54:01 AM

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famethrowa

I wonder when this album will be rehabilitated and celebrated for the quality work that it is? The current narrative is that it's a real stinker not worthy of discussion, but I love it, discovered it as a teenager when it came out and it's still good today. Sounds huge, the guitar is mental and the songs are wry but rocking. Some cringeworthy lyrics, but it works fine. Is there anyone else in the world who rates it? I never heard much of the second album though, by that time I had gone into the Dave back catalogue.

McChesney Duntz

I, too, think the Machine (first album at least) is underrated - the great Pushing Ahead of the Dame blog (as well as the recently-issued second volume of adapted blog entries by the same author, Ashes to Ashes) gives it about as fair a shake as anyone I know of has...

https://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/category/tin-machine-1989/


sevendaughters

It's insanely awful. There's no chemistry and they're just grabbing at ideas and hoping that the perceived authenticity of a real rock band that namecheck Glenn Branca, Pixies, and flying buttresses (seriously) will make people look past the floundering. Glass Spider and Never Let Me Down burned him hard and this response is almost parodic in its on-the-noseness.

Bowie was an authentic fake so it's only right he should be a totally fake authentic. The first two tracks are inept blues jams looking for direction. It's as if these songs represent the first time these people had actually played with one another. The less bad songs are very simplistic rock songs, almost offensively so, as if to say that going to a rock direction from pop means being boneheaded (which is why I hated Grinderman, even with its tongue-in-cheek).

It's also really fucking long!

The second record is actually a little better and more thought out but also Bowie cedes the mic twice, which sort of says...something.

Head Gardener

I saw them live at the National Ballroom in Kilburn back in the day, they were FUCKING LOUD

Baby Universal, by Tin Machine, was the last really great Bowie track, for me.

Johnboy

I always liked the first Tin Machine LP

Prisoner of Love and I Can't Read are great Bowie tracks

the science eel

Quote from: sevendaughters on February 18, 2019, 08:49:10 AM
Bowie was an authentic fake so it's only right he should be a totally fake authentic.

I think that's pretty fair (I had to think about it for a while).

He really was lost for a few years. What's sort of forgotten is that after the bad 80s pop albums and then THIS mess, he did the 'Sound + Vision Tour' in 1990 and played his greatest hits to stadia around the world (the only time I ever saw DB live and he was OK apart from the prick Belew screeching solo guitar over everyfuckingthing).

And then - I dunno what, was it Black Tie White Noise next? semi-respectable, at least. But that means at least half a decade of rubbish.


SteveDave

Thanks to that Dylan Jones book I found out that Dave was an alcoholic in the late 80s which leads me to believe that Tin Machine was his nickname.

sevendaughters

I don't mind Black Tie White Noise as it goes, the Nite Flights cover is decent and while there's some near M People crud it's an easy listen. His mojo properly returns on Outside.

PaulTMA


thugler

I find it a really bizarre record in that it's so straightforwardly boring. I just can't get my head around it. It's loud and yet clinical and thin somehow.