Tin Machine II
| Tin Machine II | |||||
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The unedited European album cover
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| Studio album by Tin Machine | |||||
| Released | 2 September 1991 | ||||
| Recorded | Sydney October 1989 – December 1989; Los Angeles, March 1991 | ||||
| Genre | Rock, hard rock | ||||
| Length | 49:07 | ||||
| Label | Victory Music | ||||
| Producer | Tin Machine, Tim Palmer, Hugh Padgham | ||||
| Tin Machine chronology | |||||
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| David Bowie chronology | |||||
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| US album cover | |||||
The US album cover, with the Kouroi's penises airbrushed out
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| Professional ratings | |
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| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| AllMusic |   |
| Blender | |
| Entertainment Weekly | C |
| MusicHound | "woof!" |
| The New York Times | favourable |
| Q | |
| Select | 1/5 |
| Trouser Press | unfavourable |
Tin Machine II is an album by Tin Machine, originally released by Victory Music in 1991.
The band reconvened following their 1989 tour, recording most of the album in Sydney. The band played an impromptu show at a small Sydney venue on 4 November 1989, which prompted a rebuke from the local musician's union before taking a rest while David Bowie conducted his solo Sound+Vision Tour and filmed The Linguini Incident.
In describing this album, Reeves Gabrels said "this album is as aggressive as the first one, but the songs are more melodic. Last time, we were screaming at the world. This time, I think, they're all love songs in a strange kind of way." Reeves joked that his playing style was something his friends called "modal chromaticism, which is 'any note you want as long as you end on a right note.'"
Gabrels later stated that at the time he was deeply into Nine Inch Nails' album Pretty Hate Machine and was looking for an industrial edge to his own guitar work for the album. Ultimately (after recording track after track of guitar noise), he found a "shard of guitar noise" that he liked and used it on the album track "Shopping for Girls," a song about child prostitution in Thailand. Bowie said of the track:
That song actually came out of an investigative magazine article that Reeves' wife wrote on child prostitution around the world. And one of the places she went to was Thailand. Reeves had the rather unsavory job of hiring the children and then getting them out of the brothels to Sara, who could then interview them. We were just talking about those experiences one night. And I've also been in Thailand and witnessed the same kind of thing. The actual approach of how to write the song was quite devastating. 'Cause it was so easy to slip into sensationalism. I tried all kinds of ways of approaching it … the moral point of view … and I just ended up doing it straight narrative. That seems to make it stronger than any other approach.
"If There Is Something" (a Roxy Music cover) was originally recorded during the sessions for the first Tin Machine album but didn't come out satisfactorily, so it was shelved until this album.
The track "Goodbye Mr. Ed" was started as a jam the band used to tune up one day. Tony Hunt recalled "We all came back from lunch and David had written a whole sheet of lyrics for it, and then he put the vocal on later with the melody." Bowie described the meaning of the song this way:
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