DOWN TO EARTH

Compared to the first two Prog cornerstone Rainbow albums, "Down to Earth" is as far away from Prog as any straight rock album could get, but despite the cheesy artwork on the cover the albums contains some good songs, including their most well-known monster mainstream hits "All Night Long" and "Since You Been Gone".

With the addition of keyboard player Don Airey, bass player Roger Glover and "cool'n'snappy dude" singer Graham Bonnet the band achieved a more AOR sound, though Ritchie sneaked in one or two classical bits here and there, especially on "Eyes of the World" starting with a synthesised snippet from what sounds to me like Holst's "Mars" from "The Planets" suite but is only momentary. Graham Bonnet is a very strong vocalist, and had huge (vocally, not literally!) shoes to fill from Ronnie Dio's. Having taken on the job, he soon lit Ritchie's short fuse when doing a less than professional job remembering song lyrics, but all came good except his services were only used on this Rainbow album. Graham made many friends, though, as he went on to make the underrated pop/rock album "Line-up", which had Micky Moody on guitar,Cozy Powell on drums and Jon Lord on keyboards.

"No Time to Lose" is a straight rock song, "Makin' Love" is a nice ballad with a catchy "Perfect Strangers" style guitar sig from Ritchie, "Love's No Friend" is a good song in the David Coverdale mould, and which I feel would have been better done by him. "Danger Zone" contains some eastern style riffing from Ritchie and "Can't Happen Here" style "Lost In Hollywood" rounds the album off, though the band's live set would have only included two songs from this album I would guess!

Difficult to rate, as I think only three songs really hold this album together, two brilliant ones, but...

ROCK MUSIC RATING 4/5 PROG RATING 2/5

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