Ελληνικά
Deep Purple – Slaves and Masters: The wrong album with the right name – or maybe the other way around?
Genre: Hard Rock / AOR
Country: United Kingdom
Label: RCA
Year: 1990
There are albums that carry the weight of their songs and others that bear the burden of what happened before they were even recorded. Slaves and Masters clearly belongs to the second category. Upon its release in 1990, the problem for many Deep Purple fans was not whether it was a good record. It was that Ian Gillan was not behind the microphone.
His substitute was Joe Lynn Turner, Ritchie Blackmore’s longtime collaborator in Rainbow. With Roger Glover, Jon Lord and Ian Paice completing the line-up, the famous “Deep Rainbow” label was almost inevitable. And indeed, Slaves and Masters is noticeably far from Purple’s classic DNA. Lord’s Hammond is further back, improvisational explosions are fewer, and their place is taken by a more controlled, melodic hard rock, adapted to the AOR aesthetic of the time.
But this does not automatically mean a bad record.
“King of Dreams” is an excellent opener. Dark, with a hypnotic riff by Blackmore, a wonderful vocal line and that dramatic elegance that Turner knew so well from the Rainbow years. Next comes “The Cut Runs Deep”, clearly more edgy, where finally Lord and Blackmore start to convey more of the chemistry we expect from Deep Purple. And when “Fire in the Basement” plays, the record acquires the dirty rock ‘n’ roll smile it had been withholding.
This first trio is also the strongest argument in favor of the album.
“Truth Hurts” is atmospheric with an excellent Turner, but “Breakfast in Bed” revolves around the generic American hard rock of the day. “Love Conquers All”, despite Blackmore’s nice playing, is an overt power ballad that could be found on any decent 1990s AOR record. And this is exactly the main problem of Slaves and Masters: several times it sounds good, without necessarily sounding like Deep Purple.
“Fortuneteller”, on the other hand, is one of the hidden gems of the album. Mysterious, with oriental shades and a great Blackmore, it somehow heralds aspects that the guitarist would later explore with Blackmore’s Night. “Too Much Is Not Enough” brings back the more commercial side, while “Wicked Ways” closes the album with more intensity being one of the most convincing espousals of Purple and Rainbow aesthetics. The official version includes nine compositions. Their remastered versions in 2012 & 2013 also include “Slow Down Sister” and “Love Conquers All” – “King of Dreams” in single edit.
Turner, however, is perhaps the one who has been wronged the most by history. He is not trying to be Gillan – and he is right to do so. He sings in his own way: clean, melodic, dramatic and with remarkable control. The issue lies not in his performance but in the fact that his presence inevitably shifts the center of gravity towards Rainbow of the Bent Out of Shape period. He later defended the album, rejecting the label “Deep Rainbow” as unfair.
Members’ opinions on Slaves and Masters were divided: Jon Lord and Roger Glover did not consider it an original Deep Purple album, while Ritchie Blackmore called it his favorite from the reunion period and Joe Lynn Turner one of the band’s last great works.
Commercially, the change did not bring about the renaissance they had probably hoped for. The album stalled at No.45 in Britain and No.87 on the Billboard 200. The initial critical reception has also been harsh, although the subsequent valuation has become noticeably more lenient. And probably rightly so.
Slaves and Masters is not some overlooked masterpiece of Deep Purple; it lacks the dangerous chemistry, organic freedom and personality of their big moments. But it does have good songs, a Blackmore who can still change the whole atmosphere with a few notes, an exemplary Roger Glover, the unmistakable economy of Paice (the band’s longest-serving member, since its inception in 1968) and a Turner who does exactly the job he was hired to do.
Perhaps his biggest “sin” was that he was released under the name Deep Purple on the cover. Listen to it without this requirement and what remains is a well-made, melodic hard rock album of its time, with three or four great moments.
