Yeah, don't get your hopes up too much. This is more of a blend of old and new partly down to an arguably lazy desire to get more album related content up on the blog in less time. Whilst I'll still do Shout Out posts about older albums or new collections of old albums, I thought it would be good to have blog posts where I discuss several all in one place, dedicated a couple of paragraphs or so to each of them.
One of the other reasons for this is that I feel like talking about albums in short, 140 character bursts on Twitter isn't really a great way to archive my thoughts about these works of art. I might still tweet about them if I'm bored/want to share my thoughts in a way that I know people will read but if you want a more in-depth view of my reaction to these albums, this is the place to be!
Speaking of Twitter, the first three albums are ones I've mentioned listening to already! You might know my summarised verdict of the albums but as I said before, I'll go into them with more detail than a tweet stream but less than a fully fledged review. Also, I don't know how I'll choose albums for future Rapid Fire posts but I'll try to keep it to a mix of old and new albums that I don't have much to say about.
Alright, let's see if this works!
1. 1987 - Whitesnake
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I can't say I'm a Whitesnake fan but since I liked their Deep Purple covers album and a few random tracks off other albums, I thought I'd give their iconic album a listen all the way through. Along with containing their three biggest tracks ("Here I Go Again", "Still Of The Night", "Is This Love"), it's also a pretty decent Hard Rock album which is saying something, considering it came out in the late 80's. It's a guitar driven album, even down to the power ballads, and whilst few of the technical solos stand out, there are plenty of epic riffs to get stuck into.
The lyrical songwriting mostly boils down to your typical feast of romantic platitudes and four out of eleven songs all start with the same chord slide on guitar, making this a little bit uninspired when compared to other iconic Rock albums of the decade. However, this album does one thing incredibly well; it rocks. It's an album you can stick on in the car or at home and just enjoy all the way through, making it great in my books.
1. Still Of The Night
2. Give Me All Your Love
3. Bad Boys
4. Is This Love
5. Here I Go Again
6. Straight For The Heart
7. Looking For Love
8. Children Of The Night
9. You're Gonna Break My Heart Again
10. Crying In The Rain
11. Don't Turn Away
ALBUM RATING - 7/10
2. Bark At The Moon - Ozzy Osbourne
I knew two songs off this album before listening to the whole thing; the title track and "Centre Of Eternity", both of which I love. I was curious to see if the rest of the album could live up to that level or, at the very least, give me another reason to call Randy Rhoads overrated. Turns out this isn't the best album to support my argument as it's pretty mediocre overall. A lot of slow tracks and some very generic Heavy Metal plague this album, aside from the tunes mentioned above and "Slow Down", a song that may well have inspired some of the filler tracks on Iron Maiden's Powerslave.
Ultimately, it's not an album I'd recommend to any fans of the Golden Age Of Metal (1982-1985) as the title track/album opener sets the bar way too high for an artist of Ozzy Osbourne's quality to ever meet. It's a decent follow up to the Randy years but I'd argue that Diary Of A Madman is a stronger album as a whole. Shame, as I rate Jake E. Lee highly but it sounds like he was dragged down by the Prince Of Darkness.
1. Bark At The Moon
2. You're No Different
3. Now You See It (Now You Don't)
4. Rock 'n' Roll Rebel
5. Centre Of Eternity
6. So Tired
7. Slow Down
8. Waiting For Darkness
ALBUM RATING - 5/10
3. For All Kings - Anthrax
I was tempted to review this album on the blog but since it took me so long to actually finish the whole thing, I opted against it. The reason I chose to listen to this having only listened to two of their other albums was all because of one track; "Breathing Lightning". I love that song, even if it doesn't sound like classic Anthrax and has a pointless instrumental outro, and I was hoping the rest of the album would follow a similar suit. Sadly, the first half is mostly just aggression and unimpressive Thrash and the shining songs in the second half don't even begin to make up for the last 40 minutes or so of noise.
There are a couple of tracks that sound like a good blend of modern and classic Anthrax, which is probably good news for fans of the band. However, fans of the genre might be split down the middle. It's decent Thrash but nothing special, certainly not Spreading The Disease or even Among The Living. This might be controversial but I'd rate the former a lot higher than the latter, even if both albums are great. For All Kings doesn't even come close to either of them, but I doubt anyone expected it to.
1. You Gotta Believe
2. Monster At The End
3. For All Kings
4. Breathing Lightning
5. Suzerain
6. Evil Twin
7. Blood Eagle Wings
8. Defend Avenge
9. All Of Them Thieves
10. This Battle Chose Us
11. Zero Tolerance
ALBUM RATING - 4/10
What albums or bands would you like me to discuss next? I'm not sure what I'll talk about next week (possibly a Shout Out post) but let me know if there's anything you'd prefer.
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