THE HOUSE OF BLUE LIGHT

Here is one typical, mediocre failure, Band that was big in the seventies continued releasing albums in eighties. This one sounds as a bad copy of "Stormbringer". The only cool thing about this one is the cover itself.

This DEEP PURPLE line-up (Blackmore/Gillan/Glover/Paice/Lord) is my favourite, and that's one more reason why I was so disappointed after discovering "The House Of The Blue Light".

All the tunes are straightforward, plain hard-rock at it's worst. Occasionally the record sounds like power-pop or hair/glam metal album (which is not necessary a bad thing, but it sounds like a BAD pop or glam).

The biggest success was "Hard Lovin' Woman", later often played live. It's almost impossible to avoid comparison with the almost-similar named track "Hard Lovin' Man", which is way better. The rest of the tracks are not much better. "The Unwritten Law" got an awful glam-metal chorus. "Bad Attitude" is a dull hard-rock song, with quite annoying Ian's vocals, absolutely incomparable with his vocal parts from the rest of the band's career. And so on and so on.

The only song that stands just a little bit out of the mediocrity crowd is "Mitzi Dupree", simply because of bluesy, catchy melody.

This album deserves one and a half star simply because of its ingredients; from the progressive rock point of view I will not round it up to two stars. If you want to listen to the 80's DEEP PURPLE, go and check "Perfect Strangers" and leave this one for someone else.