DIFFICULT TO CURE

The once so great Rainbow entered the worst period of its career with this album. While the previous album, Down To Earth, already showed some signs of their apparant downfall, that album still offered more than a few traces of the brilliance displayed on the Dio-era albums. Difficult To Cure, on the other hand, has almost no redeeming features at all!

As always with Rainbow, the band once again suffered line up changes here. While Graham Bonnet was a poor replacement for Ronnie James Dio, they still managed to pull together a decent album with him. Joe Lynn Turner is worse and this time they crossed the line into the mediocre. The great Cozy Powell was also replaced here with Bobby Rondinelli. Both are very good drummers, but they were hardly allowed to show that on these Bonnet/Turner-era albums.

Like on Down To Earth, Rainbow once again chose to cover a Russ Ballard song. It was a bad idea the first time around and it is no better here. There is a very nice guitar/keyboard solo section on Spotlight Kid which is the highlight of the whole album, but the rest of the song is just as awful as most of the other songs are too. I am not going to comment on each individual track here since they are all very similar and if you have heard a couple of them you pretty much know what the rest sounds like. There is not much variation on the album. In terms of progressive tendencies this album is almost completely empty.

The song writing here is mediocre at best, and the lyrics are cheesy and full of the regular Rock 'N' Roll clichés. The tedious No Release goes 'Can't get no, can't get no, can't get no release' and is just what I wish the record company would have told the band concerning this album. They could have topped this rejection with 'Tut uns leid, vielleicht das nächste mal!' (maybe next time), which incidentally is the title of another one of the album's tracks. The latter is an instrumental which is basically just a guitar solo without direction; listenable but totally unremarkable.

There is one further instrumental on this album which is an adaptation of Beethoven's Ninth. This is probably intended as a tribute, but to my ears it is more of an insult! Ritchie would perform this one live many times with a much better result. Beethoven is probably turning in his grave over this!

This album is for hard core Rainbow and Blackmore fans only (and even if I consider myself one of these I find very little to enjoy here). The disappointment induced by this album will be difficult to cure indeed!

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