Tornado: The Rainmakers
[Polygram Records, 1988]
AMG Rating: 7
Review: The Rainmaker’s second album finds their basic Midwestern rock sounding a little tired, despite more studio polish and Steve Phillips’ solid guitar work. While the band sounds more accomplished than on their 1987 debut, Tornado lacks anything as arresting as “Rockin’ at the T-Dance” or “Let My People Go-Go” on that album, or “Reckoning Day,” on their next one, although “Snakedance” and “Wages of Sin” come close.
For most of Tornado, Bob Walkenhorst tones down his yelp of indignation, which is both the most distinctive and potentially annoying characteristic of the band’s sound. The restrained “Small Circles” shows how conventional the band could be, suggesting how easily the Rainmakers could have carved out a comfortable career as a standard AOR act. Nice as that track may be, Tornado generally sticks to the Rainmaker’s strengths: being wry, provocative, and confrontational. Only the overly long “I Talk With My Hands” is truly a poor effort, seriously bogging down the album with a misguided attempt at dance-oriented rock. Even when they come up short on melody, though, as on the bland “No Romance,” Walkenhorst’s lyrics usually provide something to listen for.
The Rainmakers next release, The Good News and the Bad News, would
offer more of Walkenhort’s outrage, which may have been what Tornado needed to register as one of the
band’s better efforts.—James A. Gardner, All Music Guide
Bonus JAG blab: Seems like only a couple of years ago, I started doing the AMG thing with albums that, by and large, had gone out of print (and some that had never been released on CD at all). How quickly that revolving door of Time spins me around a bunch of times and dumps me out on a slushy winter sidewalk.
Like an old Warner Bros. montage, the pages have been ripped off the calendar by the hands-full and those original reviews I did for AMG are 5 or 7 or more (really?) years old, even if they do stink like fresh cow flop. (Man, what was I thinking? These old reviews read like they were written by a ol’ schoolmarm who’s periodically trying to emulate Maynard G. Krebbs, or something. How embarrassing.)
Er, right, about the Rainmakers, when I wrote reviews of their first two or three albums, and AMG put them on the site, all those albums were out of print, and the prospects of them ever being available looked remote. In the ensuing years, there seems to have been a comparative ‘maker-mania: they’ve reunited, done a new album or two, toured. All three of their first albums are back in print and, best of all from my perspective (seeing as how I already had those albums on CD, and I got them as cutouts), there are several superb Rainmakers and Walkenhurst solo shows available, in lossless audio, from the amazing concert repository at archive.org …
So if you happen to be moved to
investigate the Rainmakers by any of my reviews (which are still at the AMG
site and will eventually be here), this is a real opportune time to get with
it.