BRET MICHAELS: Custom Built

Released July 2

At first glance, Bret Michaels' latest musical effort looks like a new album. He's got the theme song to his forthcoming show on there and a sprinkling of new tunes including one featuring Miley Cyrus (!). But on closer analysis, it's mainly smoke and mirrors: Custom Built is only half-new, a strange jumble of new tracks with a bunch of re-mixes, demo takes and re-issues thrown on to push it out to album length that ultimately serves no purpose. The blend of genres is all over the place, a confused and jarring hodge-podge of musical styles from slick AOR to sleaze rock to country rock to tracks with heavy dance beats.

A couple of them aren't that bad: "Riding Against the Wind" is decent radio rock and "Lie to Me" rocks hard, but neither are anything more than average and neither are good enough to lift this album beyond novelty status. For some reason, there's two versions of "Nothing to Lose", one of which features Miley Cyrus singing flat and hopelessly off-key as if she's never even heard the song before. Her performance is so bad, it makes you wonder how it was allowed to be released. And given the apparent nature of the lyrics, it's downright creepy that a teenager should even be singing this with a 47-year old man. There's a version of Sublime's "What I Got" that sounds like Michaels driving out to Brad Nowell's grave marker and dancing on it, and "Wasted Time" is a re-hash of "Every Rose Has its Thorn", except suckier. To cap that off, the country version of "Rose" from Freedom of Sound appears just two tracks later as if Bret wanted to show everyone just how crap "Wasted Time" actually is. Then there's a "club mix" (yes, that means horrible early-90s style techno-rock mash up) of "Go That Far" and a rock version of "Driven". After some more adequate but unspectacular country-rock newies, Custom Built finishes with "I'd Die for You" from the Letter from Death Row soundtrack.

I suppose with all his TV work and health issues, Michaels has just found it difficult to put together many new songs since his previous solo album. After all, it was only five years ago. It's really hard to see the point to this at all.

1. Riding Against the Wind
2. Lie to Me
3. Nothing to Lose
4. Wasted Time
5. What I Got
6. Every Rose
7. Got That Far (club mix)
8. Driven (rock mix)
9. Open Road
10. Rock'n My Country
11. Nothing to Lose (demo version)
12. I'd Die For You

Rating: 20%

BON JOVI: The Circle

Produced by John Shanks with Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora

Released: Yesterday

I'm not sure what "the Circle" is, but it could be something to do with the direction that Bon Jovi has been travelling for a while now. Despite some odd excursions into country-rock and deconstructive acoustic experiments (which, it must be said, was actually a pretty interesting thing for this band to do), most of the Jovis output has been pretty formulaic and predictable since These Days (and how many of us can remember a single song off that?). Have a Nice Day was their best album in a long time even if most of the songs sounded surprisingly alike, probably because the emphasis was on the good-time rocking out that made Bon Jovi so huge in the first place. The Circle isn't as successful at recapturing that vibe, instead trammeling a path of laidback contemporary pop-rock along similar lines to that of Bounce.

The Circle is very typical modern Bon Jovi, a safe, formulaic collection of straight-forward radio rock and heart-string tuggers that broach the usual Joviesque subjects: love, yearning and heartbreak, and workaday tales of ordinary people. The first two tracks are standard Bon Jovi, a sure-fire upbeat lightweight rocker in "We Weren't Born to Follow" and then "When We Were Beautiful" the usual balladic workout that is also from the soundtrack to the somewhat self-indulgent DVD of the same name that comes with the limited edition version of the album. In "Work for the Working Man", Bon Jovi revisits "Livin' on a Prayer" briefly (even stealing his own song's bassline) as he courts his Springsteen muse, but in the end he winds up a little off-target. The anti-war song "Bullet" is something of a surprise with its liberal use of heavy (for Bon Jovi) and distorted guitar and one of the most explosive solos Richie Sambora has pulled off in a very, very long time. For the most part however, it's all pretty innocuous and predictable fare: midpaced light rockers offset with wistful ballads, little in the way of musical interludes to distract the attention from Jon's voice and lyrics that are either corny ("Fast Cars") or direct steals from the Beatles ("I had a girl we fell in love/Or should I say she had me") or dozens of his other songs.

Bon Jovi freaks will love this because they'll be getting exactly what they want (and being married to one, I know this to be true), but most others probably won't find The Circle to be that exciting. I do quite like "Bullet" though.

1. We Weren't Born to Follow
2. When We Were Beautiful
3. Work for the Working Man
4. Superman Tonight
5. Bullet
6. Thorn in My Side
7. Live Before You Die
8. Brokenpromiseland
9. Love's the Only Rule
10. Fast Cars
11. Happy Now
12. Learn to Love

Rating: 50%

PINK LIVE IN SYDNEY

If I only had one word to describe this show then I'm not sure I'd be able to find it. Spectacular? Amazing? Tremendous? None of those seem superlative enough by themselves. I'm quite sure I've never seen a concert like it, and after 28 years of concert-going and having seen everyone worth seeing from U2, Pink Floyd and the Stones to some crappy little indie band at a pub in Waterloo, that's saying a lot. In fact, this could have been the best show I've ever seen. I'm not quite sure what I expected. Pink's always struck me as an artist with real integrity and talent far beyond the usual plastic pop divas (like the one-hit rn'b "sensation" I got dragged along to see one night who nervously lip-synched three songs and slunk away like an embarassed school girl), but I certainly didn't expect this. As much as I love Napalm Death and Iron Maiden, I've never seen Barney Greenway or Bruce Dickinson sing while hanging upside down from a trapeze four storeys in the air, and probably never will. This feat alone puts Pink a long way out in front of just about any performer ever (there is, of course, an argument that those guys don't need to pull such stunts, which is true, but watching someone do it is still very, very cool).

More than half the crowd were women, which is starkly different from the 2/3 male audiences I'm used to seeing at metal shows, and ran the gamut from middle-aged mums to little girls to 18-25s wearing rub-on tattoos and short blond wigs. Warming them up for the main event was Sydney band Faker. Their New Wave-ish sub-XTC guitar pop is catchy enough to keep a good portion of the crowd entertained for a while, and they did seem to get a surprisingly long set; at least, it appeared to be quite long. I'm not sure whether Nathan Hudson is English or if he just uses an English accent as part of his band's Britpop schtick but if it is just an act then someone should punch him in the face. The keyboard/guitar player dude ponced around so much I thought he was going to whip out a keytar by the end of it; a couple of catchy tunes aside, Faker are a bit like a crappy New Order cover band, but shittier.

Not too long afterwards, with "Highway to Hell" cranking out over the screams from the crowd, the lady a stupendous amount of Australians are still clammering to see burst out of a trapdoor in the middle of the room. With her six-piece band kicking off into "Bad Influence", Pink whizzed through the air on a harness to a main stage decked out like the titular funhouse of her current album, festooned with carnival lights and with a big slide each side of her drummer. It would be easy for me to say this was an overhyped, all-show-and-no-go debacle, but it would also be very wrong. Only the most jaded curmudgeon could not have been entertained by this extravaganza. Pink is the real deal: pint-sized but larger than life, tough and tender, and there's an air of genuine honesty in whatever she does. Instead of just a randomly-ordered parade of hits, the Funhouse show is more like a musical in five acts. After the tough rock chick opening stanza, she shifted into a more seductive mode, writhing around on a couch to an almost industrialized version of "I Touch Myself" before getting all bold and brassy again with "So What".

Then the dancers and backing singers were gone as Ms Moore did "Family Portrait" accompanied only by the piano before she made herself even more vulnerable by attempting to play a guitar for "I Don't Believe You," making fun of her complete lack of ability and stopping a couple of times to ask her guitarist if she was "doing it right". A startling and thunderous version of "Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You" ramped up the party atmosphere once again, during which all stops were pulled. With no more of a waver in her voice than if she were dancing around down below, Pink dangled and swung upside-down from a trapeze four storeys above the stage. Yep, Gene Simmons might fly up to the rafters, but he stands on a little platform once he's up there. Pink was being held head-down by her ankles, and singing better than dozens of her contemporaries do when they're standing still. The aerial tricks continued into the encore too when she finished off a rock version of "Get the Party Started" by bungee-jumping and closed the show by sailing above the audience dripping wet and wrapped in a huge pink ribbon.

This truly was a spectacular show. I'm not about to go out and carve "P!nk" into my flesh, start putting her music on repeat in the car or anything like that, but for a grisled old metalhead who went along to be with the wife and to see what all the fuss was about, I came away thinking I'd just seen one of the best shows ever. And that's pretty much what a concert should do.

Set list:

• Highway to Hell (intro)
• Bad Influence
• Just Like a Pill
• Who Knew
• Ave Mary A
• Don't Let Me Get Me
• I Touch Myself
• Please Don't Leave Me
• U + UR Hand
• Leave Me Alone (I'm Lonely)
• So What
• Family Portrait
• I Don't Believe You
• Crystal Ball
• Trouble
• Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You
• Sober
• Bohemian Rhapsody
• Funhouse
• Crazy
• Get the Party Started
• Glitter in the Air

PS: I should have mentioned this, but her band was killer. I tried to find out who they were but wasn't able to. The drummer was great and the lead guitarist is a monster.

COLD CHISEL: East

Produced by Mark Opitz and Cold Chisel
Released: 1980

In mid-1977, Cold Chisel was a hard rocking blues band that couldn't get a record deal. By the end of 1980, they were the biggest-selling act in the country. This album is why. A finely-crafted slab of contemporary radio-friendly rock and pop, East never faltered from its opening seconds and remains to this day one of the best Australian albums ever made.

Cold Chisel's previous album Breakfast at Sweethearts had taken the rough edges off the band's brash sound and begun to display its pop sensibilities. With East, the slick production of Mark Opitz enhanced them even further. That all five of the band's members contributed songs for the first time also helped to create a bunch of tunes that continue to resonate through the national psyche.

East succeeds because its subjects are so familiar to its audience. They are simple songs about the everyday experience: "Every night when I come home/I settle down to prime-time limbo," sings Jimmy Barnes in "Ita"; on "Standing on the Outside" he dreams about robbing a TAB and setting himself up in a personal Paradise somewhere. Other songs are about dreams come unstuck, like the jaded protagonist of "Cheap Wine", who just leaves it all behind for "cheap wine and a three days' growth". "Four Walls" is a sorrowful piano ballad about life behind bars and the emotional "Choir Girl" follows a young woman through an abortion.

Of course it wouldn't be Cold Chisel without straight out rocking, and the pensive mood of the ballads is balanced by the brash rockabilly of Barnes' "Rising Sun", the smouldering, political "Star Hotel" and the ragged "My Turn to Cry". Every song was memorable, as East struck the perfect balance of all the band's moods. Ian Moss' "Never Before" became the first song ever played on Triple J, Barnes still performs "Rising Sun" in his live shows and Phil Small's sweet pop ditty "My Baby" remains a radio staple to this day.

28 years later, East is still the perfect Australian rock album.

1. Standing on the Outside
2. Never Before
3. Choir Girl
4. Rising Sun
5. My Baby
6. Tomorrow
7. Cheap Wine
8. Best Kept Lies
9. Ita
10. Star Hotel
11. Four Walls
12. My Turn to Cry

Rating: 100%

STEVE LUKATHER: Everchanging Times

Produced by Steve Lukather and Steve MacMillan

Released: 2008

Steve Lukather has probably played on more albums by more people than any other musician in recorded history. If that's a bit hard to believe, there's a discography page on his website that takes about half an hour to read. So it's pretty surprising that the man has ever been able to find time to record an album of his own. Everchanging Times is his fourth solo release, and now that he's called time on Toto, there may well be more. If this is any indication of what he still has in store, his fans should be far from disappointed that his main vehicle has been garaged for good.

At various points Everchanging Times evokes Falling in Between and even some bits of early Toto albums, but this is also very much Luke being Luke. The title track opens the album with a cool, slick rock vibe, just the sort of stylish playing you would expect from the man. It's pretty apparent right away that the music here is likely to go in just about any direction, and Lukather is certainly one guy who can pull this off. From rockier numbers like "New World" he can then give a polite nod to Steely Dan with the jazz-fusion of "Stab in the Back", then churn out a dirty groove for a funky run through John Sloman's "Jammin' With Jesus" complete with a snapping bass line from Leland Sklar and a big church organ sound.

Elsewhere, "Icebound" could indeed have slotted comfortably onto any Toto record and on the gloriously smouldering "Tell Me What You Want From Me" Lukather lets his oldest son Trevor chop out the riffs as he sprinkles tasty guitar runs over everything. There's no need to talk about the production. You know it's going to be one of the slickest, cleanest sounding things you've ever heard, and the guitar-playing is just peerless.

Everchanging Times did take a couple of spins to really appreciate, but it was well worth taking the time to let the hooks set. It might not get the critics talking, but Luke's devoted fanbase will love this.

1. Everchanging Times
2. The Letting Go
3. New World
4. Tell Me What You Want From Me
5. I Am
6. Jammin' With Jesus
7. Stab in the Back
8. Never Ending Nights
9. Icebound
10. How Many Zeros
11. The Truth

Rating: 85%

DIRE STRAITS: Brothers in Arms

Produced by Mark Knopfler and Neil Dorfsman

Released: 1985

Coming three years after the progressive jazz-rock opus Love Over Gold and riding the success of the enormous hit "Money for Nothing", Brothers in Arms would do for Mark Knopfler what Born in the USA had done for Bruce Springsteen: turn a guy in his mid-30s into a pop idol. It was done in a similar fashion too, with finely-crafted songs embellished with a timely pop sensibility.

The album is dominated by "Money for Nothing", the sardonic indictment of the MTV generation delivered from a disgruntled punter's point of view and driven by a distorted guitar riff Knopfler borrowed from Billy Gibbons. The irony that it was sung by a balding Scottish Jew who hadn't made his first record until he was 30 wasn't lost on the audience, but no one cared. "Money for Nothing" was such a huge hit and so clever a song that it could have over-shadowed everything else on the album had Brothers in Arms not been by Dire Straits. Because it was, most of the other tracks assert themselves just as well. On the opener "So Far Away" they return to the blues they cut their teeth on; "Walk of Life" is a feel-good 12-bar boogie with an enormous sing-along hook. The band's jazz inflections emerge in the smoky ballad "Your Latest Trick" and "Why Worry" rings with the tones of the steel-bodied National guitar on the album's cover. "Ride Across the River" featuring jungles sounds and tribal beats is one of the strongest tracks, the first of a suite of songs in which the various wars in Central America are used almost as a metaphor for his parents' experiences as Holocaust refugees. The title cut rounds these out, and thus also the album, in a manner reminiscent of "Private Investigations" but far more spiritual.

Brothers in Arms was one of the biggest albums of the 1980s, and as one of the decade's best, deservedly so.

1. So Far Away
2. Money For Nothing
3. Walk of Life
4. Your Latest Trick
5. Why Worry
6. Ride Across the River
7. Man's Too Strong
8. One World
9. Brothers in Arms

Rating: 95%

JEFF BUCKLEY: Grace

Produced by Jeff Buckley and Andy Wallace

Released: 1994

Every generation needs its romance album, and for sophisticated Generation Xers, Grace was that album. An audacious mixture of styles and disparate influences, Jeff Buckley assembled his carefully orchestrated songs from a heady blend of jazz, blues, rock and folk and touched base with all manner of classic artists, many of whom would subsequently heap praise on him.

Some commentators have criticised Grace for containing no less than three covers, but this is as unfair as suggesting that Elvis and Sinatra were somehow lesser artists for not being songwriters, and overlooks Buckley's bravery at those he attempts. His brittle version of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" has since often been lauded as definitive; his take on the tragic "Lilac Wine", a track previously only recorded by female artists, is equally commanding.

Yet it is Buckley's own songs that truly carry the album, a work of ornate textures and delicate arrangements providing a backdrop for his intuitive vocals, the key feature of which was his evocative falsetto so stunning that it became bigger than he was. It was, however, but one aspect of his talents. With "Last Goodbye" he somehow conjures the spirit of Led Zeppelin so overwhelmingly it sounds like it could have come from Physical Graffitti and the heart-rending poetry of "Lover, You Should Have Come Over" is made all the more moving by the sheer emotion of their delivery. If nothing else, Grace showed Jeff Buckley to be an artist who poured true passion into his work and there's simply no way of telling how great he could have become.

The legend of Grace has grown almost exponentially since Buckley's death but there's little doubt that even if he had lived, this album would still hold a very special place in the hearts of many.

1. Mojo Pin
2. Grace
3. Last Goodbye
4. Lilac Wine
5. So Real
6. Hallelujah
7. Lover, You Should Have Come Over
8. Corpus Christi Carol
9. Eternal Life
10. Dream Brother

Rating: 100%

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN: Born in the USA

Produced by Jon Landau, Bruce Springsteen, Chuck Plotkin, Steven van Zandt

Released: 1984

In order to review this incredible album I had to take myself back in time to my high school days. It's easy to appreciate Born in the USA when you're an adult a few years older than Springsteen was when he wrote and recorded it, but to get a really good idea of the impact this release had, you have to go back to a time when an average looking guy in his mid-30s suddenly became a pop idol that 14-year old girls were hanging poster of on their bedroom walls.

Bruce Springsteen had never been as well known in Australia as he was at home because his songs were so rooted in the American experience. But Born in the USA had such a successful pop formula that kids everywhere could get into the music without needing to know what the songs were about. School girls wanted to be on stage with The Boss like that chick in the video for "Dancing in the Dark" without even caring that it wasn't even actually about dancing.

There's almost no better start to any album than Springsteen's magnificant Specktorish triumph of the title track. The discordant, clanging synths punish the listener into submission as the urgent, ragged despair of the singer's delivery lets them know they are hearing a song for the ages even if most of them -- including parents and US Presidents -- would completely miss the point.

Born in the USA's themes are the same as those Springsteen had always followed but his introduction of synths and dance beats served to disguise the real meaning of the songs, although even the more obvious ones are still deceptive. The character in "Working on the Highway" turns out to be a member of a chain gang, and "My Hometown" is set up as a tribute but is actually exactly the opposite, a tale of shattered dreams and broken pride. Even so, Springsteen stills give his small town denizens a sense of hope in the exuberance of the beat and injects humour into tracks like "I'm Going Down" and "Glory Days".

Bruce Springsteen perfected his craft here and made stories of ordinary Americans into three and four minute sagas that even teenagers with no grasp on irony could enjoy. Without doubt, this is one of the best albums of all time

1. Born in the USA


2. Cover Me


3. Darlingotn County


4. Working on the Highway


5. Downbound Train


6. I'm on Fire


7. No Surrender


8. Bobby Jean


9. I'm Going Down


10. Glory Days


11. Dancing in the Dark


12. My Hometown

Rating: 100%

JIMMY BARNES: Bodyswerve

Produced by Mark Opitz and Jimmy Barnes

Released: 1984

When Jimmy Barnes released this scream from the garage, the beast that had been Cold Chisel had only been dead for ten months; their final studio album had only just fallen off the charts. Bodyswerve lacks the polish and commercial appeal of his other albums and is totally bereft of the superstar duets and endless power ballads that littered those works. This is probably why his solo debut is one of the most overlooked recordings of his catalogue, but it is also the reason this remains one of my favourite Jimmy Barnes albums.

Barnes' songwriting has less finesse than either Don Walker or Steve Prestwich, but essentially Bodyswerve is very reminiscent of the earliest Cold Chisel outings. A balls-out uncompromising rock record, Bodyswerve alternates between the smouldering heavy blues of "Daylight" to flat-out belters like the hard-partying anthem "Paradise" to the fury of "Boys Cry Out for War" that is almost metallic in its raw intensity. "No Second Prize" is a simple, slow-burning rocker that highlights the sheer power of Barnes' voice and also lets guitarist Mal Eastick shine; the remixed version from For the Working Class Man dropped a vocal track over the long fade of this track, robbing it of some of its purity but here it is the stand out that remains solid even now. Some of the other songs aren't quite as memorable and the covers of "Piece of My Heart" and "A Change is Gonna Come" probably add little more than some extra minutes to the playing time. Barnes made better records both before and after this, but the energy and passion on display here makes this a pretty worthwhile hard rock album.

1. Vision


2. Daylight


3. Promise Me You'll Call


4. No Second Prize


5. Boys Cry Out for War


6. Paradise


7. A Change is Gonna Come


8. Thick Skinned


9. Piece of My Heart


10. Fire


11. World's on Fire

Rating: 65%