Richard Marx has exactly the right skills to put together a professionally crafted rock & roll album: He's a good guitarist and a great singer, and he has a knack for the sort of raucous melodies mainstream rockers adore. Marx has learned all the lessons of Seventies-style hard rock (like how to keep the guitar sound big without being overbearing); he knows that every chorus should feature at least one harmony vocal and tries to keep his rhythm section swinging (though he draws the line at anything funkier than a "Brown Sugar" beat). In short, he's as safe and likable as Eighties rockers come.

Maybe that's why Repeat Offender seems disappointing. It isn't that the album is unlistenable, mind you. From the burnished power chords of "Nothin' You Can Do About It" to the anthemic chorus of "Children of the Night," the songs go down as easily as chocolate milk. But beyond mere listenability, Repeat Offender seems to have no real purpose: the rockers regurgitate an aesthetic that seemed tired when Marx was in high school; the ballads are bland; and the one message song ("Children of the Night") is so suddenly self-dramatizing it's hard to imagine anyone but Marx taking it seriously. for all its merits, Repeat Offender is recidivism at its worst. (RS 555)

J.D. CONSIDINE