FINALLY GIVING A SPIN TO: Rising by Rainbow (1976)

FINALLY GIVING A SPIN TO: Rising by Rainbow (1976)

FINALLY GIVING A SPIN TO is one music nerd's attempt to fill in some of the gaps in his music vocabulary by checking out albums he never got around to hearing, deliberately avoided, or just previously neglected. No strict guidelines other than only choosing albums I've never heard all the way through before - at best familiar with only a song or two - and listening to the album in it's entirety.

 PRECONCEIVED NOTION: Rainbow is just another metal band I don't need to hear.

While watching VH1's Metal Evolution documentary over the weekend I noticed two different musicians being interviewed wearing t-shirts featuring the cover art to Rainbow's album Rising, which is what sparked me to give it a spin. I wasn't into metal growing up, so Rainbow is a band I've never paid much attention to. I've never heard a Dio album, but I do have a soft spot for Ronnie James Dio's vocals on Black Sabbath's Mob Rules (especially the overdramatic "The Sign of the Southern Cross"). In the past few years I've finally  gone beyond the Deep Purple hits and checked out full albums, so I'm pretty familiar with Ritchie Blackmore's work.

Rising came out in 1976, the band's second album, recorded with a new lineup after Blackmore sacked everyone but Dio. Hearing this album for the first time 35 years after it's released, it's hard to separate what might have been original back then from what's cliche now. It's over-the-top and stone faced serious, which makes it seem ridiculous on the surface. But there are some fantastically strong riffs and stellar playing from an incredibly tight band - which make the outright goofy lyrics seem a bit charming. Dio delivers his vocals with such passion and sincerity it's hard not go along for the ride, even though part of me thinks Rainbow had a least a small influence on Spinal Tap's lyrics. And the keyboards - those are Viv Savage keyboards.

"Run With the Wolf" is exactly the type of song I've made fun of Dio for for years - a tale of beasts and evil, but it's got a strong groove and the second half of the song builds around Blackmore's excellent soloing. The song about an obsessive fan, "Starstruck", is a solid boogie blues number with a killer hook that could have come off of a Deep Purple record. The shortest song on the album, "Do You Close Your Eyes", clocks in under three minutes and starts out like early Queen and Quadrophenia era Who, which had me quite excited, but it quickly fell into more generic metal pop. "Stargazer" is the big prog rock epic, complete with the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra, that I'm a little ashamed to admit how much I enjoyed. The album closes with another eight plus minute number, a faster rocker that dips into Judas Priest territory and has an ending that reminded me of Blotto's "Metal Head".

If I heard this when I was younger I never would have given it a chance, but now it's an album I surprisingly enjoyed enough to buy and it makes me check out some other Rainbow records. I never thought I'd like an album with lyrics as unintentionally silly as "There's no sun in the shadow of the wizard" and "Ride the carousel and cast a magic spell, you can fly".

FINAL VERDICT: Solid record I was wrong for avoiding. Glad I heard it enough to buy it and plan to give it more spins in the future.

FINALLY GIVING A SPIN TO: the Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter by the Incredible String Band

FINALLY GIVING A SPIN TO: the Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter by the Incredible String Band


This year I plan to listen at least one album every week that I've never gotten around to listening to in it's entirety. They might be albums I know only one or two songs off of, but more than likely they'll be albums that are totally new to me. I have no plan of attack in how I'll select the albums, but they'll most likely be albums I've seen referenced in reviews of other albums or those albums that I just know of but have never actually heard.

For the inaugural "FINALLY GIVING A SPIN TO" I'm going with a band I had a hunch I wouldn't like and avoided for many years, Scotland's psychedelic folk eccentrics the Incredible String Band. I'm sick of seeing them mentioned in articles without knowing what they sound like (it's hard to read Mojo without seeing a String Band reference). From what I've read, their third album, 1968's the Hangman's Beautiful Daughter is their deifinitve album, so that's where I'm starting.

My main fear was that this was going to be too hippyish for me, and that's what it turned out to be. This album is what I imagine always playing in the head of Neil from the Young Ones. Much of the instrumentation is intriguing, especially some of the Eastern instruments I'm not very familiar with, and they create a great ambiance. But the amatuerish communal vibe doesn't work for me, it sounds dated to my ears to the point of feeling more like a parody, which I know it's not. At times I hear little bits of Syd Barrett or Frank Zappa, but I think both of those artists went into the studio with better songs. Strangely I also hear a bit of Chris Knox occassionally in the vocals and some of the improvised percussion - I'm curious if he was an ISB fan. I'm not exactly sure what I was looking for in this album, but I think if they were even a little weirder or had a more outgoing sense of humor I might be more interested. This is one of those albums that I'll have to just accept that I'm not the target audience for. Although I'm glad I finally gave it a listen.