STRAIGHT BETWEEN THE EYES

Whatever disease they contracted while making Difficult To Cure they certainly have not been cured yet here. Straight Between The Eyes continues in most respects from where the previous Difficult To Cure left off. Joe Lynn Turner is still here and this time his vocals are better, more in line with those of Ian Gillan whom he clearly tries hard to emulate. And he does this so successfully that you could almost believe that this is Ian Gillan singing on some tracks! Needless to say, the expectations for this album were very low after the disastrous Difficult To Cure. It was therefore rather easy for the band to make an album that lived up to these low expectations. They played it very safe this time and they build strongly on the formula established by the previous album. This means straightforward Hard Rock 'N' Roll with little or no interesting features.

Once again, the material is weak and not memorable. The lyrics are once again filled with old Rock 'N' Roll clichés and many cheesy lines. The song titles alone reveals the generic character of the music. Songs like Tite Squeeze and Rock Fever are good examples of this. In terms of progressive content this is basically empty. I am not going to comment on each individual track here since they are all very similar and if you have heard a couple of them you pretty much know what the rest sounds like. There is not much variation on the album.

One song that stands out above the rest is the closer Eyes Of Fire. It has a slight Far Eastern sound that I like, augmented with some slight symphonic keyboards and some nice guitar work. However, it hardly compares very well with the similarly 'oriental' sounding Gates Of Babylon from the Long Live Rock 'N' Roll album. Another song that I find acceptable is the opener Death Alley Driver which features a decent instrumental break. This song sounds very much like Gillan (Ian Gillan's solo band in the 80's).

The once so great Rainbow entered a downward spiral after the half-decent Down To Earth in the late 70's and this downward spiral continued with this album. Apart from Eyes Of Fire and a few decent bits here and there is very little to recommend Straight Between The Eyes.

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