When he went for a masterpiece on
The Nylon Curtain
,
Billy Joel
worked with his band and producer
Phil Ramone
, crafting a
Beatlesque
song suite that was perfectly in step with
Turnstiles
. For
Storm Front
, he decided it was time to change things. He fired
Ramone
. He fired everyone in his band, save longtime drummer
Liberty DeVito
. He hired
Mick Jones
, the architect behind
Foreigner
's big AOR sound, to man the boards. He wrote a set of sober, somber songs, save
"That's Not Her Style,"
a weirdly defensive song about his model wife,
Christie Brinkley
. He was left with an album that is singularly joyless.
Joel
makes no bones about his ambitions for
-- when you lead with a history lesson as your first single (the monotonous chant
"We Didn't Start the Fire"
), it's clear that you're not interested in fun. That wouldn't have been a problem if his melodic skills weren't in decline.
packed all the strongest numbers into the first half of
, from the rocking
"That's Not Her Style"
and
"I Go to Extremes"
to the fisherman's plight
"The Downeaster 'Alexa'"
and the power
ballad
"Shameless,"
which
Garth Brooks
later made a
standard
. Compared to the murky second side, which perks up only mildly with
"Leningrad"
"And So It Goes,"
it's upbeat, varied, melodic, and effective, but when it's compared to his catalog -- not only such high-water marks as
The Stranger
or
Glass Houses
, but with a record as uneven as
The Bridge
-- it pales musically and lyrically. The five singles (
"Fire,"
"Style,"
"Extremes,"
"'Alexa',"
"Goes"
) were catchy enough on the radio to propel the album to multi-platinum status, but in retrospect,
sounds like the beginning of the end. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine