Certif1ed Stormbringer is the second album from Mk III Deep Purple, with David Coverdale handling vocal duties, and it's yet another inconsistent effort, with metal interest only in the title track - but OMG, what metal interest there is!

Stormbringer (the song) absolutely smokes; Judas Priest, we hear where you came from! This is riffing from the Metal Gods - on your knees and chant after me; "We are not worthy"!

There just aren't enough superlatives - and you'll have read a million other reviews saying how good this song is. Those reviews are absolutely right - any that don't praise it to the skies don't know what the hell they're talking about!

But it all takes a nosedive from here.

The funky aspects are still present, albeit to a lesser degree, as the sleaze fest of "Love Don't Mean a Thing" demonstrates - Lord really piles on the dirt here, but Blackmore is happy to noodle up and down the pentatonic for decoration. It's whiskey time!

The weakest song on the album follows, a real snore-fest of a ballad with faster bits, with Coverdale singing like a girl for crying out loud. The guitar solo is altogether too pretty for my tastes - utter mush.

"Hold On" is a MoR plodder - Coverdale gives it all he's got, and sounds amazing, but that ain't going to save a song that sounds like aural wallpaper.

"Lady Double Dealer" is more like it - uptempo, balls out rock and roll. Very lacking in the metal department, though Blackmore's solo kicks some ass.

We're back to shaking our funky stuff for "You Can't Do It Right" - play that funky music, white boys! Sensuous stuff, and a really cool song, but 0/10 on the metal scale.

"High Ball Shooter" is an interesting mish mash of Boogie and straight Southern rock with a backbeat. The performances of the musicians are impressive, but no metal.

"The Gypsy" and "Soldier of Fortune" are both standout tracks - the latter casuing my neck and back hairs to rip my T-Shirt from my shoulders - but neither are in the same league as the title track.

1/9 is a pretty poor score to have to translate into a rating, but I reckon "Stormbringer" (the song) is so good that I'm going to bring it up to 2.5 stars for the album - which is a pretty darn generous score for a metal site in my opinion!

Time Signature You can do it wrong with the one you love...

Genre: hard rock / funk rock

I don't think that metalheads will find this album interesting at all. Well, the opening track "Stormbringer" is a might hard rocker, which reminds me more of Rainbow, Blackmore's band after he left Purple, and the same also goes for "Lady Double Dealer"; "High Ball Shooter" is also an uptempo rock, while "Gypsy" is a bit heavier, without being metallish. The rest of the tracks on the album are, to varying extents, influenced by funk music.

The funkiness is not a problem to me and had this not been a metal-focused website, I might have given the album 3,5 stars. However, I think that, apart from "Stormbringer" and "Lady Double Dealer", most metalheads would find this album rather boring.

SouthSideoftheSky Hold on!

This is the second Deep Purple album since David Coverdale and Glenn Hughes joined the band and Stormbringer follows closely the formula established by Burn. Indeed, there is not much difference between the two albums in style. The respective title tracks open the respective albums, and they fill the same roles and are among the best songs on these two albums. Stormbringer too has a great guitar solo, but the interesting Neo-Classical interplay between Blackmore and Lord that made the title track on Burn so exciting is sadly absent in Stormbringer. But like on the Burn album, the majority of the rest of the album is occupied with funky Blues rockers of varying quality. If you love Burn, Stormbringer is surely a good addition to your collection. But for many of us this is far from essential. When listening to these albums, I’m often tempted to think that they could have made a much better album had they taken the best songs from each and combined it into a single album. But as they now stand, they are not very strong efforts despite some good moments on each.

The real standout for me here is the delightful acoustic ballad Soldier Of Fortune that closes the album (a side note: Ritchie still plays this lovely song live in Blackmore's Night. Candice, his wife, sings it beautifully!). What we find in between the opening title track and the closer is however rather weak material. These songs are much closer in nature to what Coverdale would go on to do with Whitesnake than with what Richie would do with Rainbow. This means rather standard, generic Blues rockers often with sleazy and even sometimes chauvinistic lyrics! The Gypsy is, however, a decent song.

Hardly Deep Purple’s finest moment

Raff Though I find "Stormbringer" to be quite a pleasant listen, it is far from being the masterpiece "Burn" was. The band was already disintegrating during the recording of this album, with Blackmore leaving to form Rainbow soon after its release. Great title, great cover... What about the music? Not bad by any means (we are talking of Deep Purple, after all), but nothing earth-shaking either.

As it is quite well-known, the main reason for Blackmore's departure were the overt funk influences brought to the band by new members David Coverdale and (especially) Glenn Hughes. Personally, I do not mind funky rhythms at all, on the contrary, and Hughes knew what he was about - after all, he was chosen to fill Glover's shoes because of his remarkable work with Trapeze. His singing is much more in evidence on this album than on "Burn", where he shared vocal duties with Coverdale and had no opportunity to showcase his vocal talents on his own (as his partner did on "Mistreated"). Here, the two vocalists have a solo spot each, Coverdale with the acoustic, wistful "Soldier of Fortune" and Hughes with the soul-tinged "Holy Man", where his magnificent pipes get a chance to shine in all their glory. Since Coverdale's voice is almost a polar opposite - dark, emotional and much less polished - they are in many ways an ideal pairing. Shame about the egos taking over and wrecking the band.

The trouble with "Stormbringer" is that the songs, while eminently listenable, have little personality of their own - with the notable exception of the sweeping title-track, the aforementioned "Soldier of Fortune" and "Holy Man", and the keyboard-driven, mid-tempo "The Gypsy". There are a couple of straightforward hard rock numbers and another of more funky- and soul-influenced ones (which are, in my opinion, better than the former), but everything sounds a bit contrived and the strains tearing the band apart are quite evident. Jon Lord's mighty Hammond finds very little space, and Blackmore's incendiary guitar sounds remarkably lifeless.

Though I recognize its shortcomings (hence my rating), "Stormbringer" remains an album I have lots of time for, especially since it is not overtly commercial like other albums by other equally celebrated bands. Therefore, open-minded metal fans may find it a pleasant change of pace from edgier stuff.