From: Record Mart & Buyer - May 2000, Issue 211
by: NICK HAMLYN
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A jobb oldali mezőbe kerül majd a magyar fordítás.
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"Richie Sambora solo - Stranger in this Town 1991"
Solo albums made by lead guitarists tend to suffer from the fact that the majority of the guitarists are not particularly strong singers. Richie Sambora however does not have this problem. Used to providing backing vocals in Bon Jovi, he is more than capable of stepping into the spotlight and he does an excellent job on "Stranger in this Town". Surprisingly, the emphasis is less on guitar playing than on the performance of a set of varied songs, Sambora employs his colleagues from Bon Jovi, with star session bass player Tony Levin replacing Alec Such and he integrates his own playing into the mix in much the same way as he does with the regular group. For one track, "Mr Bluesman" he is self-effacing enough to call on the services of Eric Clapton to play the lead guitar part over his own acoustic strumming. (Clapton does what he always does on these occasions and plays with greater authority and passion than he ever seems to on his own records!) In truth Stranger in this Town is not a great album, but it is an eminently listenable one - and it has musical ambitions far greater than those apparent in the albums made by Bon Jovi up to this date."
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"Richie Sambora - Solo - Undiscovered Soul 1998"
Richie Sambora's follow-up to "Stranger in this Town" is even less obviously a guitarist's album. Produced by Don Was and with a band of well-known session names in tow, "Undiscovered Soul" delivers a range of song-styles with hardly a guitar solo to be heard anywhere. Sambora maintained that he wrote 30 songs in order to be able to select the 12 he finally recorded and certainly they are a well-crafted lot, if not perhaps the kind of thing ever likely to set the rock world alight. As Sambora explained to The Guitar Magazine at the time "When you're in a band as big as Bon Jovi, you really have to give the people what they want - you can't just spin off in a foreign direction that the fans don't understand. If I wake up feeling Pink Floyd one day, I don't think I could put that on a Bon Jovi record, but on a Richie Sambora record, I can fly through whichever moods I like." These are laudable sentiments, but it would seem that Sambora never does feel Pink Floyd, if by that he is implying an experimental approach of some kind. Certainly none of the music on "Undiscovered Soul" sounds like Bon Jovi, but its moods are all very much determined by commercial considerations nevertheless."
Special thanks to Richie's Girl, Jan Baxter, for typing these up for us!
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