STRAIGHT BETWEEN THE EYES

Oh dear, "Straight Between The Eyes" is the second album by Rainbow with Joe Lynn Turner on vocals. The album is the evident sign of Blackmore's will to become more and more commercial in attempt to catch brand new sections of audience, especially in the USA. The overall sound is very 80's and very far from the original, typical of the Dio's era releases, much more radio friendly common hard rock, even though there are some considerable tracks like "Death Alley Driver", poor man's "Highway Star", however featuring a great Blackmore guitar solo and the decent ballad "Stone Cold", nothing special, but nice. "Bring On The Night" is decent, too, recalling rhytmically very strongly the superbe "Tarot Woman" , from "Rising", especially in the intro, very soon however the track lose interest turning into the same old 80's hard rock track. The impression is the band is working using songs formats already tested before by Blackmore in both Deep Purple and early Rainbow: clear in "Tearin' Out My Heart" absolutely a bad rip-off of "Soldier Of Fortune" and somehow similar to "When A Blind Man Cries" from "Machine Head". The awful "Power" could be described as Rainbow trying to sound like Queen (compare this one to Queen tracks like "Sweet Lady" or "Hammer To Fall"), horrid guitar sound, bad vocals, horrid drumming. Very little interest in the rest of the songs: "MISS Mistreated" is an useless hard rock number, "Rock Fever" is so bad that it's even hilarious with lyrics like "Lemme see ya rock, lemme see ya roll, lemme see ya burn". In the last track "Eyes Of Fire" orential harmonies are rediscovered in something which is a very very bad rewriting of "Gates Of Babylon". "Straight Between The Eyes" is a really boring 80's hard rock album, with no progressive hints on it.

2 Stars