The new century has seen an interesting innovation come to light – firstly some bands (Dream Theater) began paying tribute to the albums that influenced their music by playing those entire albums live in concert. Secondly, bands realized this was a popular thing, and began dedicating parts of their own concerts to playing an entire album of their own!
Here then is Holy Diver Live which contains amongst other tunes the entire Holy Diver album.
The DVD of this concert has the gig in its running order. For the double disc version, they have wisely split in into two. The first disc contains Holy Diver in its entirety, including Simon Wright’s drum solo (which surely is becoming increasingly unnecessary in this day and age) and Doug Aldrich's guitar solo (less unnecessary, but still a time-filler). The second disc contains the remainder of the concert, including songs from the range of Dio’s career as a singer.
Anyone expecting Dio to sing this exactly as it was recorded 20+ years previously are expecting too much. Interesting to note is an interview with Doug Aldrich some time after this release, in which he states he was unhappy with his own performance, due to the lack of actual rehearsal leading up to the night. While his guitaring is actually pretty spot on to the original versions put down by Vivian Campbell (one of Aldrich’s finest assets), it does sound like Dio is unsure as to how to approach singing songs he hasn’t performed for two decades, or at all. If I was to be picky, I’d say that he could have done better – but how do you say that to the man with the greatest voice in metal? It is unrealistic to expect ‘studio’ vocals sung live, especially after so many years.
All in all this is a great live album. It is great to hear the entire album done live, with so many wonderful songs. The second disc is also just brilliant, combining such Rainbow classics as “Tarot Woman” and “Gates of Babylon” with “One Night in the City” and “We Rock”.
Originally, Craig Goldy was playing on this tour, but was injured not long before this was to be recorded, and Doug Aldrich came on board to help out. It is one of the redeeming features of this album.
Rating: Chock fun of greatness. 5/5
No comments:
Post a Comment