Virgin Steele

Finally after all these years Virgin Steele's long lost albums Virgin Steele and Guardians of the Flame are seeing the light of day. I as a die hard Virgin Steele am very excited about this but the casual fan would do wise and not pick this cd up as he will most likely be dissapointed. Virgin Steele sounds nothing like what we are used to hearing from this band today, it is more in the vein of songs like Hot and Wild and Saturday Night with a little bit of a loose epic feel to them but at the core is the simple but fun rocker. It is still quite enjoyable though and its cool to hear the origins of this awesome band. Theres way too many tracks here to do a song by song review so I'll stick with the highlights. The first track to jump out at me is Dead End Kids it kinda reminds me of an 80's thrash band doing a mid tempo song. Its fairly straightforward and gets your head moving. David uses alot of his falsetto technique throught this album but its more like punctuated screams than his angelic singing of today and Dead End Kids has many such outbursts. Drive On Thru starts off with *gasp* a cowbell and is a Motley Crue type song, reminds me of C'mon and Dance, the chorus has that epic feel to it in the dynamics and melody. Children of the Storm is one of the few tracks that hints to what Virgin Steele would become it sounds like it couls have fit in on the Noble Savage album. Burn the Sun is another song that is like Children of the Storm, it has the same feel to it as Storm did. The rest of the album consists of fairly decent driving rock songs. This album is for diehards only and if you love Virgin Steele youll love this album. It isn't poor or anything, it is a good cd but if you're used to the latter day more epic and flamboyant material you'll be shocked at what our beloved Virgin Steele started off like.