Perpetual Fire
Endless World
6.1
I hate Dennis DeYoung. I didn’t mind Styx when Tommy Shaw or whoever was singing. But when DDY opened his shithole and farted his sickly sweet farts I wanted to beat people with car fenders. I may have, in fact. I used to drink an awful lot, and black out nearly as much. There were stories…but surely they were JUST stories… Anyway, I hated this dandy assed emoticunt more than I hate REAL crooners like Neil Diamond or Barry Manilow. At least they were honest about their craft. DDY thought he was a ROCK AND ROLL singer! And we all paid, every time “Come Sail Away” or “Sing for the Day” finger nailed across the chalkboards of our minds. I hated him even more than Steve Perry or Kevin Cronin. That is a pure, starshine bright hate that burns to the very heart of musical elitism and pricks a hole to dimensions of rage even fucked up has been critics don’t normally get to experience.
So there is no fucking way I am going to like this record, or any other cheesy power metal band that relies on DDY vocals to get their points across. And if the band backing the vocalist is regurgitating clichés faster than you can keep track of, you have a recipe for frustrated tedium. It is the same galloping powertrad metal that every other powertrad band plays. Technically flawless, musically strangled and utterly devoid of life or honesty. Even when the singer breaks out his raspy black metal cackles it sounds about as spontaneous as the solution to a math problem. And while the band plays lively, there is a vast difference between that and sounding alive.
To be fair to people who don’t hate this kind of music, the band delivers what you want the way you want it. Clean, error free, scrubbed fresh and planned like the invasion of Normandy. You will not suffer surprise or discord on this release. The workmanship is absolutely above critique. Flawless performances that would have made McCartney jealous in his heyday. Where it lacks raw emotion it overflows with perfect take after perfect take. All captured in the crystalline production powertrad bands seem to demand. It is, if nothing else, a very well chromed construct.
But my bottom line is that you can and should find better. I suggest the latest Vanden Plas as an alternative in the same musical order to give you anything this disc can AND a decent helping of musical intrigue to boot. This is, after all, Metal, not calculus. It has to come from someplace deeper than technical perfection, in my never humble opinion. At the very least, let us all work to eradicate the Dennis DeYoung vocal tradition from our beloved class of niches. Whether or not we have to put up with galloping pretense for eternity, we should be able to kill off the syrupy virus that destroys and has destroyed so many promising bands. Nevermore.
