| Dio "Diamonds - The Best of Dio" 1992, Vertigo Gloon: This best of album brings together songs from Dio's first five albums from the early 80's into the start of the 90's. I got into Dio through his work in Sabbath especially the awesome 'Heaven and Hell', and Diamonds seemed a logical place to start being his 'Best of' album. What I found on Diamonds was a harder, louder, rockier sound than on his Sabbath releases and a unique if slightly cheesey keyboard sound, anyway to the review. Diamonds well and truely illustrates Ronnie's climb to riches and fall to shame, with the early material meeting the early expectations I had and the later failing miserably. The album kicks off with three songs from Dio's debut 'Holy Diver' and each is a gem, from the thumping title track to the keyboard driven 'Rainbow in the Dark' to the haunting 'Don't Talk to Strangers', wow. The following three are pilfered from 'The Last in Line' with the awesome title track reminding me a little of Manowar for its build up and power, with the cheesey 'We Rock' and 'Evil Eyes' also being solid, then comes the rest of the album. I don't know what happened between drinks for Dio but the rest of the material is just uninspiring, boring shit. Tracks from 'Sacred Heart', 'Dream Evil' and 'Lock Up the Wolves' just suck! not because of any drastic change in style, just because they are badly written and tedious. In fact if I didn't know this was a best of I would best describe the second half of the album as a bunch of below average filler tracks. All I can recommend is to go out and buy the first two albums and pretend that the rest never happened. Favourite Tracks - Holy Diver, Rainbow in the Dark, The Last in Line. Rating - 6.5/10 Dio “Magica” Spitfire , 2000 Gloon: I must say that I was pretty excited when I heard about Dio’s new fantasy concept album, especially after purchasing the killer tribute album, which reminded me how good early Dio used to be. Unfortunately Magica is FAR from exciting. For starters it’s a concept album based on Ronnie’s own story, oh dear. Secondly the band which Ronnie has supporting him suck big time. The album starts off promising enough with the atmospheric intro and ‘Magica Theme’ and even ‘Lord of the Last Day’ didn’t phase me too much, but from there on it gets crap very quickly. From the 70’s rock of ‘Fever Dreams’ to the cheesy ‘Feed my Head’ its average effort after average effort. ‘Losing My Insanity’ is the one exception with some Blind Guardian-esque folk music at the beginning, but with this being the tenth song you would have long ago gone stopped listening and gone to make a cup of tea. This is a highly disappointing release and musically sounds more dated than any of Dio’s earlier efforts. Mr Dio has a lot of work ahead of him if he wants to stay in the race and still keep his metal god status untarnished. Favourite Tracks – Lord of the Last Day, Losing My Insanity Mark – 6/10 SECOND OPINION Lord Pale : Some nice musical pieces and a good story line . This could have been excellent with Dio’s vocals and some nice epic songs but instead Dio’s vocals frequently sound crap , and the music is slow and unnecessarily rocky ( in a bad way ) and dated . Poor song writing , muted production . Favourite Tracks – Magica – Reprise , Losing My Insanity , As Long As It’s Not About Love Rating – 4/10 |
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