Fading Rock Star Cliche Disc No. 1: The oldies set. Fading Rock Star Cliche Disc No. 2: The blues album. Suave video drone Robert Palmer resorted to the first way back in '92. It's hard not to be at least a little surprised it took him this long to get to No. 2. Ah well, better late than never. And despite the banality of Drive's concept, we have to admit Palmer could do -- and has done -- a lot worse. As always, he has swell taste in tunes -- this set includes chestnuts like Why Get Up?, Mama Talk to Your Daughter, Hound Dog, I Need Your Love So Bad and even ZZ Top's TV Dinners. And while Palmer croons 'em as slick and sophisticated as you'd expect, he's also smart enough to enlist a backing band with enough authentic blues grit and Cajun gumbo to keep him from coming off as too smooth for the room. Dashes of Indian-flavoured melody, Caribbean lilt and N'Awleans boogie, meanwhile, offer enough diversity to keep the disc from being a one-track affair. For a musical cliche, Drive isn't as boring an outing as you expect.

Track Listing
1. Other Light
2. Complicated Question
3. Stay In Shadow
4. Good Times
5. Absent Elements
6. Thousand Mile Wish
7. Conversations
8. Last Scene of Struggling
9. Panic Attack
10. Therapy
11. One Thing
12. Obvious Heart -->