BENT OUT OF SHAPE

Bent out of Shape is the seventh full-length studio album by UK hard rock/ heavy rock act Rainbow. Their last album Straight Between The Eyes (1982) failed to impress me much and to be honest it actually annoyed me quite a bit. So I wasn´t really expecting much from this album either. Unfortunately I got exactly what I expected from this album.

The music is melodic hard rock/ heavy rock deeply rooted in the early to mid eighties. Lots of cheesy sounding keyboards, a cliché of a hard rock/ heavy rock singer, a quite anonymous rythm section and a guitar hero in Ritchie Blackmore who mixes his blues rock/ hard rock past with some slight neo-classical ideas. If it wasn´t for the latter´s enjoyable solo work there would be nothing on this album worth my time. The songs are generic, weak and filled with every possible cheesy eighties hard rock/ heavy rock cliché you can imagine. Just check out the lyrics to a song like Can´t Let You Go. Don´t look furhter if you enjoy rain rhymes with pain lyrics. There are ten songs on the album. Two of them are instrumentals and the short Anybody There is somewhat enjoyable while the cover song Snowman comes off as some kind of new age version of the original with sporadic guitar soloing by Ritchie Blackmore which actually works as a disturbing element in the song and not an enhancement. I much prefer Nightwish version of the song ( entitled Walking in the Air) on the Oceanborn (1998) album. the eight remaining songs are more conventional hard rock/ heavy rock songs and what you feel about this genre is of course an aquired taste. I think the genre is generally generic and bland but there are of course exceptions that shines among the many trivial and cliché filled albums out there. Bent out of Shape is not one of them IMO. If I have to mention one positive thing on the album it´s the musicianship. The vocals are strong and the performance, while a bit uninspired at times, is pretty good. It´s just not enough.

In addition to the weak compositions on the album the production is rather thin. It lacks power which doesn´t help the already weak album.

Bent out of Shape is not an album I can recommend, but people who enjoy melodic hard rock/ heavy rock might find some redeeming features on the album. I can´t give more than a 1.5 star rating. The cheese factor is simply too much for me.