Here I am back with another album that seriously disappointed me, where the bad tracks vastly outweigh the few good. However, whereas with the first in this series I was reviewing an album by a band I had never heard before, and whenever doing that your expectations are by definition not too high, this time the disappointment is much deeper, as the album is by an artiste whose career I've followed for years, and from whom I had yet to see a bad album. Until this one.
The road to Hell, part 2 --- Chris Rea --- 1999 (East West)
To be fair, there are one or two good tracks on this album, but as a Chris Rea fan I would have expected much, much better, and it really made me wary of future releases by him. The opener, “Can't get through”, sets what I hoped would be the standard, with the same radio-announcements and sounds of rain that opened the original album “The road to Hell”, and even a reprise of the opening melody to the title track. After that the track slips in quality a little, but it's not too bad, considering what's to follow.
And about the only other good one is
really good, the one-letter-titled “E”.
But then you get the godawful “Coming off the ropes”...
the annoying “Evil No. 2”
Not forgetting the extremely disappointing and flat “Last open road”
The brain-crushingly dull and unimaginative “Good morning”, with its single line of lyrics --- come on Chris: you can write better than this, I know you can!
But then the album closes on the utterly hokey “New Times Square”. Oh dear!
I didn't lose faith in Chris Rea, and thankfully the last of his albums I got --- “Dancing down the stony road” --- was brilliant and reaffirmed my belief in him as an artist. But though this album has one or two good tracks on it, they're not enough to compensate for the bad ones. I almost gave up on the guy after listening to this. Don't do that again, Chris!