A good album indeed but much weaker than Perfect Strangers. Gillan and Blackmore did not get along again and Gillan left after the tour that promoted the album. Blackmore brought J.L. Turner to replace Gillan (what was he thinking ) but that's another story.

This is my favourite Purple album. Especially love the song The Spanish Archer.

Clearly inferior to Perfect Strangers but still a very credible album, with amazing technical tracks..

Given that its the album after the excellent comeback 'Perfect strangers', I wouldn't be surprised if any devoted Deep Purple fan said this was disappointing. It's certainly not quite the Deep Purple people must have been expecting in 1987, but it does have a few surprisingly good moments. Blackmore's guitar work largely complements the quirky nature of 'Black and white' and 'The spanish archer', and Jon Lord's keyboard interludes, although reeking strongly of the 80s, do still give an extra layer of excellence to the general sound. But with songs as unfortunately inconsistent as 'Call of the wild' and the overlong 'Strangeways', "House of blue light" should and could have been better. Even with this line-up though, the band certainly weren't about to fall flat on their face anytime soon.