Quick Reviews: The Power Station, Van Morrison, Megadeth, The Damned
Plus jazz guitarist Julian Lage.
ALBUM OF THE WEEK
The Power Station—The Power Station DLX [40th Anniversary Edition] [2026; 1985]
★★★
No other album captures the zeitgeist of the mid-1980s like The Power Station, a collaboration between half of Duran Duran and half of Chic, fronted by Robert Palmer. Contrary to conventional wisdom, The Power Station was not a one-and-done. The quartet reconvened eleven years later for Living in Fear, a record that vanished without a trace in 1996, its ghostly appearance confirming that this was a concept that belonged to the ‘80s. All thundering, gated drums, crunching guitars, hollow synths, and stiff funk, The Power Station certainly is a quintessential text of its time: it’s a record where the bigness is the point, a record where even the slow songs feel fast due to the production’s stainless steel architecture. The group’s T. Rex cover is a manifesto, a statement of purpose that aligns the quintet with glam rock, but this version of “Get It On (Bang a Gong)” so efficiently streamlines the song’s inherent sleaze that it feels almost sinister. The Power Station flirt with darker aspects of sensuality throughout the album’s superior first side, where Palmer’s louche delivery lends “Some Like it Hot” a hint of danger and “Murderess”—a deft refinement of the blaring “Sulky Girl” from Palmer’s Clues—carries real menace. The tension deflates on the album’s second side, when the sheer scale of the record becomes exhausting—an evolution that encapsulates its era quite nicely.
Rhino’s new 40th Anniversary Edition of The Power Station (billed as DLX) expands the album to four discs, adding nearly three discs worth of material where Palmer is a specter. He left the band not long after its 1985 release to finish Riptide, the record that finally turned him into a star, leaving the Power Station to soldier on with Michael Des Barres as his replacement. Des Barres fronts the band on its Live Aid set, which is here alongside an August ‘85 show where the group delivers an absolutely bizarre version of the Velvet Underground’s “White Light/White Heat” tricked out with canned horn stabs. Also here is “Someday, Somehow, Someone’s Gotta Pay,” the lone studio track with Des Barres that somehow wound up on the soundtrack of Schwarzenegger’s Commando. The three bonus discs are every bit an artifact of the Big 80s as the proper record, but there’s one big difference: they all illustrate how his cavernous, gated sound could often sound anonymous.
Van Morrison—Somebody Tried to Sell Me A Bridge [2026]
★★★
Attempting to maintain the momentum generated by last year’s Remembering Now, Van Morrison reverts to the mean on Somebody Tried to Sell Me a Bridge. It’s a blues album through and through,
