A SLIGHTLY SACRILEGIOUS SUMMARY OF THE 'SACRED HEART' ALBUM

After having previously reviewed the first two Dio band albums, the time has now arrived for me to talk about Sacred Heart (from '85). But to speak frankly and from the heart, it's not a time I've anticipated with unmingled joy. That's because I'd have preferred to inaugurate the present new year, millennium and century with some wholly positive and cheerful sounds. Yet apparently it was prearranged in the greater scheme of things that the first Dio band album I should review in the year 2000 is my least favourite one of all. However I'll just blame the fickle Fates a bit for this coincidence, and do what I must do - and then everyone who loves this album can blame *me* a lot and from the heart.

 

Dio stays true to his tradition of starting with an up-tempo track; this one's called THE KING OF ROCK 'N' ROLL. I guess it celebrates the good side of hero worship, which can lead teenagers (and others) towards wanting to spiritually uplift themselves, towards becoming ambitious, towards dreaming, towards acquiring the 'sacred heart' (see below) - in the same way that a teenage Ronnie James Dio was once upon a time inspired towards becoming a rock singer by worshipping an idol such as Elvis Presley. On the down side I must note however, that the track and Dio royally wave their energy around, but in effect miss out (to these ears), on royal grace, finesse and variety. Anyhow I feel that the quality of these openers by the original line-up deteriorated with each successive album (and not even the first of these songs, Stand Up And Shout, was really to my liking; I prefer the next line-up's song Dream Evil). Is this really a live track or is it, as I think I heard it rumoured, a studio track in disguise? Either way - and I apologize for being so harsh - the effect reminds me of an extra track accidentally tacked on to the beginning of the album rather than to its end.

 

Rather: right from the start I sense a lack of musical direction to this album. I well remember being first introduced to it. An intriguing antique Latin quote on its cover said that to those willing to 'venture inside', would be revealed the 'sacred heart'. These words in my mind's eye evoked pictures of, if not strictly a concept album, then one with a specific underlying connecting theme. But above all I expected this theme to be expressed in music consistently aspiring to some kind of specific lofty and mystic musical grandeur or other. As previously indicated, the expected spiritual connecting theme did prove to be there. It's that anything may be achieved by those prepared to persevere in dreaming against all odds, for it's they who will find 'the sacred heart' in the end. But this is expressed in music that over too long stretches doesn't even try to enter new directions and doesn't overall offer much more than a lesser repeat performance of Dio's previous album The Last In Line (which in itself pales, in my opinion, next to its own predecessor Holy Diver, from which, however, it's very different).

In retrospect I think that perhaps Dio shouldn't have made this particular album with the original line-up with which he was still working at that moment, but which was already about to fall apart. As is well known, relations between him and guitarist Vivian Campbell had for some time been worsening, and in all this can't have been an ideal situation in which to explore 'finding the sacred heart' to the fullest on an artistic as well as a spiritual level.

 

I've learned to appreciate some of the Sacred Heart songs nonetheless. The one I've found most memorable is - should I admit to it? - an unabashed AOR/pop-metal piece called ROCK 'N' ROLL CHILDREN (penned by Dio on his own). This tells the story of two teenagers helplessly drawn to the big city lights as much as to each other's eyes, so to speak, with apparently disastrous results. I suspect to them the way to the 'sacred heart' got closed off. In my review of The Last In Line I already explained how I think of this song as part of a triptych also comprising One Night In The City (on The Last In Line) and Naked In The Rain (on Dream Evil). It's almost as if Dio the storyteller created here for the melodramatic eighties a very sophisticated mixture of something akin to the subject-matter and plaintive mood of certain long-since forgotten very simple nineteenth century folk ballads, and something slightly akin to the melody of Neapolitan folk song. As to the latter: his soaring heroic-tenor style in these songs is likely to be deemed dramatic by some and melodramatic by others. Either way, it couldn't fit this music and subject-matter more: grandiose as well as grandly involved, he's an observer who should like to be an intervening participant but cannot. It's not music I want to hear often, but like some other great fringe art the song and performance fascinate by how they blur the fine line between culture and kitsch.

 

The musical feel of no. 5, HUNGRY FOR HEAVEN, is slightly similar. However this is an optimistic ditty which - possibly for that reason? - is closer to pop-rock than to pop-metal heaven. Dio and his co-writer bassist Jimmy Bain would seem to have developed a taste for that genre since they first tried out its doubtful charms together in the (inferior) Mystery on The Last In Line album (although I still think I read somewhere this happened on Campbell's initiative). The idiom allows him, in any case, to express his message about it being possible for even, or specifically, the most incorrigible dreamer to make his dreams come true in the end, however long this may take, in a very direct and manifestly 'naïve' way. 'You're emotion/ Running cold running warm/ The young just getting older'. Which innocent teenage mood may well be autobiographically coloured as well. He himself had after all had to 'hold out' and 'dream' for quite a few years, I suspect, before he 'could make it happen for him' (to quote), i.e. before he could make his first album (with his band Elf) in '72. Besides, into the high-flying chorus he mixes a slight, pretty, well pretty clever, whiff of slighter-toned fifties/sixties pop naïveté. All in all he proves himself as an excellent pop(rock) singer in this song.

 

There could be no greater contrast than that between nos. 2 and 9 (Shoot Shoot) - and for that reason I'm putting them side by side here. The title track SACRED HEART is an epic mid-tempo fantasy tale, but quite unlike previous Dio band epics like Holy Diver or The Last In Line (the songs). Super-melodious with a heavy riff, it's curved of line instead of angular, heroic rather than bleakly powerful. Equally, its wording is more accessible and its storytelling technique far more straightforward (in effect a Percival-like main character sets out on a quest for the 'Sacred Heart' - like the Holy Grail; along the way he fights a dragon; finally he slays the evil wizard guarding the symbol). On the one hand I don't think this is in itself an improvement, for Dio gets dangerously close here to becoming the practitioner of the straightforward 'dungeons and dragons' genre of melodic metal for which his detractors like to mistake him. On the other this was obviously an effective method to get his message across to the teenagers of those days, especially on stage where the song was complemented by special effects including the appearance of a spectacular dragon. So at any rate it's - generally spoken - the album's centre and highlight. Only to me it isn't, and for this I blame the performance, not the song itself. Or perhaps I should blame my personal taste. Campbell has, with keyboard support from Claude Schnell, fattened up out of recognition his characteristic bony guitar tone, and, along with a complaisant rhythm combo, thunders through the story without regard for its mountain peaks or river vales. Dio certainly doesn't lack feeling, but doesn't rise above this uninspiring environment enough to avoid monotonous storytelling. Then again maybe the result does reflect a specific preconceived plan. But then again maybe it doesn't, and in that case what I experience as lack of tension might be assessed as being indicative of much too much negative tension having by then built up between Dio and Campbell.

The 9th and final track, SHOOT SHOOT (also by Dio/Appice/Bain/Campbell) is a way different but far inferior song - hackneyed bluesrock, somewhat in the approved Whitesnake manner (a band in which Campbell played soon after leaving Dio, coincidentally). It could be termed a very mundane Shame On The Night, the bluesrockish Holy Diver closing gem which I regard as one of Campbell's finest moments. In addition, its structure isn't perfect: the chorus ('shoot shoot etc.') is repeated too often, halting song progress. An imperfection which in my opinion is as uncharacteristic of Dio the composer, I may add, as the previously described imperfect storytelling is of Dio the performer. However in contrast to Sacred Heart, I've found Shoot Shoot to be the album's most purely exciting track for its overall band performance. After finishing it, or at least the album, Campbell was gone. But first he - and the rhythm combo - recorded this prime example of how to squeeze the last grain of malice and excitement from such repetitive, simple bluesrock phrases. Crucial to this is that each simple recurring first note be stretched to utmost shameless capacity before it's fired into our ears and diaphragm. Into this slow-motion gunfire Dio unexpectedly leaps like a great dramatic actor jumping onto a stage, shouting like mad: 'YES! You know the feeling/ All alone, your back to the wall...'. Yet this time the message turns out to be '...So the next time someone points a gun at you/ Say: Shoot Shoot/ I won't go away...' (his tone of voice becoming mocking but in no way less deadly in the repeated 'shoot-shoots').

 

The remaining songs, nos. 3, 6, 7 and 8, are all well crafted without exploring really new horizons, but they've stuck in my mind for either the right or the wrong reasons less than the others have. So I'll restrict myself from now on to a couple of very fleeting and superficial impressions.

 

No. 8, FALLEN ANGELS is energetic metal with, for this album, some ambition in the way of complexity and pace shifts. Preceding Shoot Shoot, it's full of guns, too, but I seem to gather that this time around the violence isn't of the commendable kind. It's practised by 'fallen angels' mentioned as featuring in a nightmare (Dio, by the way, provides an emotional performance all around, and especially in the panicky nightmare sequence). The text says: 'It's a criminal world', and all in all I wonder whether these 'diamonds that spark without fire' aren't creatures hungry for capturing the netherworld of the big city, rather than 'hungry to recapture heaven' (to paraphrase). Who knows, maybe they're the ones that turned the dreams of the 'rock 'n roll children' into nightmares, too.

 

The jumpy-riffed ANOTHER LIE (3) continues Dio's 'evil woman song' tradition. (Every album by this line-up had one. Holy Diver had Gypsy, The Last In Line had Eat Your Heart Out. Musically all three might, in my opinion, be called 'just another song', I'm afraid.) 'She's a rumour in the night, maybe/ You can feel her but she isn't there etc./ She crouches, the hunter...', and thus she might be a cousin of Dio's mystical Lady Of The Lake (on the Rainbow album Long Live Rock 'n' Roll from '77) who forever lies in wait there for passing knights. So: another stage, another test to be passed by the knight on his way to the 'sacred heart'?

 

JUST ANOTHER DAY (7) might be a Monday. That is: the 'they' (see below) featured in it, might well be the employers or immediate superiors of people in spiritually mortifying Monday-to-Friday jobs - and in that case these lyrics might be claimed to already anticipate such relatively 'non-fantasy' social impressions as Dio's Double Monday (on his album Angry Machines from '96). Alternatively they might be about artists feeling restricted by their environment. However (in any case): 'But that's alright/ It's just another day...' which is why the day and the song so seemingly *positively* speed by... although somewhere along the way there was this one melancholy - and slower - moment when the thought of 'Another day to bring you down/ Another way that they have found' was trying to take over. And melancholy is a mood of which Dio is master.

In LIKE THE BEAT OF A HEART (6) Dio re-tackles, through doomy Black-Sabbath-meets-the-darker-side-of-Rainbow-ness (although something about the feel of the 'go beat your heart' section possibly predates that of typically bleak nineties Dio songs such as Pain), one of his most well-known themes. This is that everybody has a darker side, and at times it's 'screaming to get out'. Which goes to show once more - as is expressed by most of the album's apparently optimistic songs, too - that the ways to the 'sacred heart can be many, and of these, many are or can easily become, byways or dead-end streets.

Yours Karin Beks, Holland (karinbeks66@hotmail.com)