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                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, February 27, 1993                   TAG: 9302270332
SECTION: SPECTATOR                    PAGE: S-8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: JOE TENNIS
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Short

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NEW RECORDINGS

Country rock

\ Lynyrd Skynyrd's "The Last Rebel" (Atlantic) heads out of the coop like the group's Southern rock party of yesteryear is going to fly high like a free bird.

"Good Lovin's Hard to Find" is a fitting follow-up to the band's 1991 honky tonk smash "Smokestack Lightning." And "Can't Take That Away" is a logical extension of 1992's "Pure and Simple" or 1976's "All I Can Do is Write About It."

Sure, the band sounds different. But so does any band with two decades in the music biz.

Digging deeper, however, stuff like title track "Love Don't Always Come Easy" and "South of Heaven" come up bland, like the music of lesser talented contemporaries The Outlaws or Marshall-Tucker Band.

It's run-of-the-mill-Southern rock. Song construction is solid. But the songs are boring and flat. Or just plain dorky.

Two standouts - "One Thing" and "Kiss Your Freedom Goodbye" - don't sound like traditional Skynyrd. But the wailing backups of singer Dale Krantz-Rossington and Billy Powell's wonderful piano comping help the band recapture the crunching, grade-A flavor found on "This Is The Way," the second and last LP from Skynyrd's all-but-forgotten first spinoff group, The Rossington-Collins Band.

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