HEAVEN FORBID

This is NOT one of the better BOC albums. It was 10 years since their last release, and I thought they may have accumulated some really good stuff. Nope. I love about everything they have done, but this release is a mix of boring heavy rock (Damaged, Power Underneath Despair), and softer Buck Dharma tunes (Harvest Moon, Real World, Live for Me). These last three are good BOC songs in the Don't Fear the Reaper poppy vein. They are not bad but they are just not powerful enough to save this album. The rest of the tunes are dull and listless. Maybe they saved their better stuff for the next album Curse of the Hidden Mirror, which while good, is still not great. Very little to recommend this to a prog-rock fan, let alone a BOC fan. And the cover is by far the worst thing they have ever done, to put it mildly. A cover doesn't make an album, but it couldn't hurt! This is the only BOC effort I would rate at only 2 stars (except Club Ninja which I have not heard in a long time, but never thought much of.) Stick with Fires of Unknown Origin and Spectres if you want to see what the beast called Blue Oyster Cult could do. 2 stars