Released: 1996
Tracks: Space Race; Back From the Edge; Inertia; Faith; Solar Confinement; Dreamstate; I Will Not Accept the Truth; Inside the Machine; Headswitch; Meltdown; Octavia; Innerspace; Strange Death in Paradise
Best track: Innerspace or Strange Death
Track to skip: none
I have a strange history with this album. When this first came out, I listened to it and was extremely disappointed. To me, it sounded like Bruce was trying to be trendy by sounding all grunge-like. I honestly thought it was awful. And after two bad albums in a row (so I thought) then I kinda gave up on Bruce. It was a period of my life where I was discovering a bunch of new music anyway. I was getting past all the Iron Maiden and related stuff that I listened to so much, and discovering King Crimson, Frank Zappa, and jazz players like Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Years later when I got back into Bruce’s music after hearing Accident of Birth I decided to show the man some faith and give this album another shot. As you can guess, I was blown away by it. I automatically loved it and I’m totally confused why I didn’t love this album a few years before. I guess I wasn’t ready for it, or maybe I was still in my “Iron Maiden can do no wrong” phase or whatever. Whatever the reason, once I bought this I came around to thinking that it wasn’t Bruce who went into different (and bad) directions, but Iron Maiden. Yeah, Bruce made a bad album for Balls to Picasso. Maybe he knew that as well. So what he did was form a new band and come close to having that band not be his backup band, but *the* band that he just happened to be a singer of. It didn’t totally work out as he’d like, and this band would only make one true album (plus Alive in Studio A).
Bruce teamed up with a new songwriting partner and guitarist Alex Dickson and formed the core of the new group. Rounding out Skunkworks is Chris Dale on bass and Alessandro Elena on drums. Bruce has always seemed to write with great guitar players and have the results nearly always be excellent. First with Adrian Smith in Iron Maiden, then with Janick Gers on Tattooed Millionaire, and on to his partnerships with Roy Z and Alex Dickson. I love these songs that they wrote for this album! It seems to me like it’s a bit of a concept album, having to do with space travel. Reminds me of an updated version of David Bowie’s Space Oddity in a way. Either way, it’s definitely a Science Fiction type of lyrical album, but not so much that is would turn people off. That’s the lyrical part. The music part of Skunkworks is still heavy, but without the ‘metal’ attached to it. It’s obvious Bruce had been listening to a lot of Soundgarden prior to this and it shows. Some songs actually sound like Soundgarden out-takes. He isn’t screaming as much as he did in Maiden and that’s one of the reasons I was thrown off in the beginning. Without the screaming, there leaves more room for actual singing and that’s a welcome change.
One major thing that is a welcome change from the last two albums is that there are no bad songs on here. The album starts out absolutely fierce with Space Race and Back From the Edge, continues on with more great material and ends up on an extremely high note in Innerspace & Strange Death in Paradise. These two songs are killer. I absolutely love the calm bit in Strange Death. Even in listening to this right now I’m still just floored by how excellent it is. I still love Accident of Birth and Chemical Wedding a lot, but Skunkworks might actually be Bruce’s best album so far. I don’t know, I love all 3 pretty equally. I know there are some people out there who probably didn’t give this album a chance because it was different than what we were used to, but there’s no reason to ignore it forever. This is an excellent album.
Rating: 97
*****
In 2005 all of Bruce’s albums were remastered and reissued with a bonus disc of all B-sides associated with the particular album. This Skunkworks reissue has some pretty cool B-sides (and some really goofy ones) and the entire Japan-only Skunkworks Live EP…which has a great version of Iron Maiden’s The Prisoner. This Skunkworks band was pretty great and the bonus disc further shows it. Highly recommended, even more so.
Write a comment