FINYL VINYL

My only Rainbow CD to the date. I bought this one year ago, by recommendation of a friend. I've never heard anything by this band, and I'm a big Deep Purple fan! Also, I had expectations about Ritchie's and Glover's work outside Purple. This is not a total live album: here are studio versions of "Jealous Lover", "Bad Girl" and "Weiss Heim".

I must say ALL are catchy songs, we can hear fabulous choruses on "I Surrender", "Miss Mistreated", "Bad Girl", "Since You've Been Gone", "Jealous Lover", "Man On The Silver Mountain"... wait, ALL OF THEM!! Every song here is extremely catchy, and almost all of them with a very pop tendence, with some neo-classical passages here and there. I remember I found myself singing the choruses with the second listen! To my surprise, the first song,"Spotlight Kid" has a very Power Metal feeling despite that genre didn't exist on that time, and I supose it was a big influence. As I said before, almost all the songs are radio friendly and very poppy, BUT the solos are still good, with the addition of neo-classical stuff by Blackmore, creating some very nice moments, like for example, on "I Surrender", which is one of the highlights here. Without a doubt, the most interesting track for the Prog listener is "Difficult To Cure", a superb interpretation of Beethoven's 9th Symphony: "The Ode To Joy", also featuring an orchestra live! It has also a very good guitar intro and solos, and some moments of interplay between Ritchie and the orchestra, a most than interesting track! The other song that could be well recieved by proggers is the last one, "Weiss Heim" another instrumental, with a very Floydian, sad and quiet atmosphere, having once again some excellent neo-classical passages and solos, in other words, a true gem! Also here we've two of the most popular songs by the band, "Man On The Silver Mountain" (very raw, with a nice bluesy intermission and solos) and "Long Live Rock n' Roll" (the crowd sings at the end of this one), the only ones here with Dio on vocals.

Overall, a very good 'live' album, but with almost all Pop songs, that will not appeal to every Prog fan, so it's good but not essential. But there are some highlights like "Difficult To Cure", "Weiss Heim", "Spotlight Kid", "I Surrender" and "Man On The Silver Mountain". I'm looking forward to their old stuff.

Rating: 3.1/5