Bad Company - Holy Water (90)

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1 Holy Water
2 Walk Through Fire
3 Stranger Stranger
4 If You Needed Somebody
5 Fearless
6 Lay Your Love on Me
7 Boys Cry Tough
8 With You in a Heartbeat
9 I Don't Care
10 Never Too Late
11 Dead of the Night
12 I Can't Live Without You
13 100 Miles



Bad Company's last platinum album, Holy Water is a formulaic yet reasonably engaging collection of AOR hard rock.

Although the only original members on Holy Water are guitarist Mick Ralphs and drummer Simon Kirke, the band does a fair job of approximating the sound of classic Bad Company while adding enough elements of '80s pop-metal to make the record appealing to teenagers who grew up on power ballads.

And the band does turn in a first-rate power ballad with "If You Needed Somebody," which rose all the way to number 16 on the singles chart. Surprisingly, that was one of three hits from the album — "Holy Water" and "Walk Through Fire" also received a fair amount of airplay.

What that success signals is not a creative rebirth for Bad Company, but that the group knew how to follow a formula very well.

Holy Water hasn't aged as well as their original hit albums — instead of the clean, ballsy attack of Bad Company and Straight Shooter, it's awash in echo and synths — but it is a finely crafted, big-budget record of the late '80s and early '90s.

It's just as indicative of its era as Bad Company is.