#251 The Best Album of 1989, Round 1 Match #15: The Replacements vs. Tin Machine
Hey folks!
Today’s Best Album of 1989 match is:
#24 The Replacements, DON'T TELL A SOUL
vs.
#105 Tin Machine, TIN MACHINE
To vote, follow this link to the Google Form. You will need a Google login to vote. If you can’t or won’t have one, let me know ASAP (either through this newsletter, my email [kentmbeeson@hey.com] or on the Best Album Brackets Bluesky account) and I’ll see what I can do.
We have one Designated Cheerleader today, it’s for TIN MACHINE, and it’s by DC machine @bsglaser.bsky.social. Take it away, Brian!
The origin story of TIN MACHINE (the band and the s/t album) is fairly well-established: After the mega-success of LET'S DANCE, David Bowie tried and mostly failed to recapture pop lightning in the bottles of TONIGHT and NEVER LET ME DOWN. Frustrated and digging the Pixies, Bowie called up Hunt and Tony Sales (Soupy Sales' kids and the rhythm section from Iggy's LUST FOR LIFE), brought in Reeves Gabrels (an obscure guitarist who at the time was playing with Rubber Rodeo), and decided to sideline pop in favor of a rock band that was not called "David Bowie."
The idea was to get back to basics and reignite his passion for rock music. The band made 2 studio records and released a live album (unfortunately titled OY VEY, BABY) before Bowie left it behind to get back to the lucrative business of being David Bowie.
I remember buying TIN MACHINE in '89 and being struck by how noisy the guitar playing was, how Bowie sprinkled swears into the lyrics, and how in general it didn't sound either like typical Bowie or typical anything else. I hadn't listened to it in a long time, so I pulled the CD off the shelf, and you know what it sounds like now?
Pearl Jam.
I don't mean this as a diss, just a description. PJ released TEN in 1991, and there is zero chance they didn't hear and dig this record. Eddie Vedder borrowed liberally from Bowie's TM vocal attack (check out "Under the God" to hear what I mean), and the bands' sounds map neatly onto each other. Bowie was regularly ahead of his time, and it's wild to hear him inhaling "Debaser" (which Tin Machine played live, along with covering another key PJ influence, Neil Young) and spitting out the sonic template for "Even Flow."
OK, that's enough about Pearl Jam. All these years later, TIN MACHINE has aged better than plenty of albums Bowie made under his own name. The songwriting is spotty, to be sure (see "Crack City"), and the cover of "Working Class Hero" is a weird choice. But the vibe is often inspired, as often happened whenever Bowie hooked up with an idiosyncratic guitarist. (Speaking of whom: Gabrels is still in the business of kicking established UK rockers back into gear--he's the current lead guitarist in The Cure.) Did they need to write a song called "Tin Machine"? No. Does TIN MACHINE rock? Mostly, yes.
In the end, TIN MACHINE is Bowie hitting CTRL-ALT-DEL ahead of moving onto his next thing, and the next thing after that, all the way to the wondreful records he made near and at the end of his life. Artists need to do this sometimes, and Bowie was better at re-contextualizing and reinventing than almost anyone else.
As always, thank you Brian!
Click here to see the current results for the entire tournament, and click here to see the current results for the prediction bracket contest.
Yesterday, #56 The Vaselines, DUM-DUM defeated #73 Peter Gabriel, PASSION 66-56.
Thanks for voting and participating! It means zero without you folks.
Kent