Consumer Guide Album

Steve Gibbons Band: Down in the Bunker [Polydor, 1978]
Transvestite to Mickey: "What's it really take to turn you on?" Mickey: "It takes all sorts. . . ." Well now, I've been hearing tales of Gibbons's plainspoken working-class wit for years, but that's the first time he ever zinged me good. And not the last. This postpub retrenchment is strewn with colloquial turns--the words knowing and compassionate, the instrumentation rock and roll understood as a mature language. Of course, the problem with colloquialism is that when inspiration flags even slightly it sounds ordinary, and that happens here, but on the whole this is an extraordinarily inventive step forward. A−