Bananas - Deep Purple

It's taken awhile since Purple's last album to get a new one out. I know these guys qualify now for "Geezer Rock" status, and at this point in their lives, I'd wager Deep Purple isn't the most important thing in their lives. Having said that, I'd like to see less than 5 years between albums. Although, if it takes 5 years, you might as well make a good album, and that's what they did here. This is wonderful - pretty solid all the way through. Kicks Abandon in the head. It's not as good as Purpendicular, but there's several standout tracks here (House of Pain, Haunted, Razzle Dazzle, Silver Tongue, Picture of Innocence, Doing it Tonight). I think you get my point. Howver, there's one major MAJOR problem with Bananas..

Note: My rant below was from when I first wrote this review. There has since been US distribution, but no promotion. You still can't find an average US music fan that even knows this exists - and that shouldn't be. This is a wonderful album! It was originally released Aug 25, 2003, but wasn't on sale in the US domestically until sometime in 2004. What an annoyance! :mad:

Rant: That is that Deep Purple's management is to be held accountable for the failure that is the fact that you cannot buy the album in the US! Now I know that Deep Purple isn't what they were in the United States. Hell, no kind of music of this genre is appreciated anymore, it's all dominated by garbage like Korn, Britney Spears, Justin Timerlake.... However, if you're a fan of this kind of music (Purple that is, not the other crap I just mentioned), you should at least be able to get the thing, unpopular in the States that this genre is. The further annoyance is that when I tell people about the album, they didn't even know it existed! That's a bigger travesty.

Purple has NO US distribution of any kind. None. In order to obtain this album, I had to buy it from Amazon's UK site and get it imported. It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, it ended up costing me about $18 to get the CD over here, and it was well worth it because there's a lot of great tunes on the album.