Search - Virgin Steele :: Life Among the Ruins

AOR fan, you just hit the jackpot

king wolf | Jotunheim | 12/14/2007

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I'll cut to the chase: this is the best AOR album ever recorded, and AOR fans don't even know it exists.



Yes, really. It's Whitesnake-style melodic metal, and believe it or not it's better than the legendary albums of Journey, Foreigner, Michael Bolton, G n R, and any of the rest of the eighties spadex jockeys you'd care to name.



It is obscure only because it is by one of the two or three best true metal bands ever, and their fans hate this style of music. It fell through the cracks because it has been mischaracterized as a true metal album. The people who would like it, can't find it and don't know about it.



I am that rare bird, a true/power/symphonic metal (or whatever they call it these days) guy who has a soft spot for the lighter stuff. So I can appreciate this one for what it is. What it is, is a miracle: the incomparable compositional and lyrical skills of the singular genius David DeFais applied to the relatively simplistic genre of melodic hard rock.



And he, and the band, just nail it. True metal they may be, but for the duration of this delicious concoction of melodic goodness and cocky riffs they somehow cut to the core of that inner dynamic that that characterizes this subgenre, an indescribable combination of raunch and sensitivity. It just feels so right. The song quality never lets up - it's like a greatest hits album. This album would have ruled 1989; but it was released in 1994. Those are the breaks. (I'm actually glad it worked out that way, because I love VS's later albums and if they had gotten the success this album deserved in the financial sense, the later albums might never have appeared.)



Metal fan, go get any VS album after the first two, except this one; they are all masterpieces of true metal. AOR fan, welcome to heaven: you just found the Hope diamond in an abandoned coal mine. Get it, play it, keep it forever."