If those samples in the preview video are anything to go by, this could easily be their Unspoken King. And I believe I'd rather listen to Cold Lake unironically; at least it provides some entertainment.

Truth to be told, these records gave me a good laughs. For instance, DeFeis sounds like he's going for a hilarious Robert Plant imitation on ''Green Dusk Blues''. Part of me is tempted to review one of these new discs but I don't think I have the patience to spin these things in its entirely.

The albums are up for streaming guys.

Oh man this is fucking great.

Edit: KINGDOM OF THE FEARLESS NOOOOOOOOO

I am listening to the first album now and I have no idea how anyone with functioning ears could've thought these vocals were good. He really can't sing anymore. Not sure if he even tried to get any lessons or train to make up for what aging did to his voice - it sounds like he just went with the first takes no matter how sloppy or awful it was. Pure egomania. I really want to know what was going through his head.

I'm three songs in now and these are all interchangeable seven-minute slurries of half-baked rock guitars, a lot of pianos, a bunch of dying-cat wails and no hooks. It's insane really. Who the fuck did he think this would appeal to? My guess is that he didn't care and it's all just a big vanity project. Lot of musical jerking-off.

edit: "Hearts on Fire" has some decent riffs, "Child of the Morning Star" actually has a discernible chorus hook; wow, only took 40 minutes of the album to get one... granted it sounds a bit like heavied-up lounge music compared to their old shit, but still.

I'm new to Virgin Steele and have LOVED a bunch of the earlier albums I have gotten to play...

this new one is absolutely unlistenable.....a total mess.....whoa....

Ghost Harvest Vintage 1 wasn't actually that bad compared to Nocturnes, but the other two new discs are some of the worst music I've heard from such a once glorious band ever. DeFeis has absolutely lost his few remaining marbles.

I didn't even make it through the first album. "Psychic Slaughter" is probably the worst song this band has ever done. More of a statement on what it does to you rather than a song title.

This goes far beyond Cold Lake, Unspoken King, Illud, or even Lulu...no, this is like the metal equivalent of that album Corey Feldman dropped a few years back just due to the sheer incompetence of it all (and the hilarious result). The entire band sounds like it's been programmed from a computer and the dude has the most obnoxious (and hilarious) vocal mannerisms I've ever heard...by the way, this is my first time listening to Virgin Steele . Hell of a first impression...

This is the same guy that did "Veni, Vedi, Vici", right? The same guy that did "Child of Desolation"? "Emalaith"? "Weeping of the Spirits"?

What the fuck is this? DeFeis must be trying to outdo DeMaio's awfulness. This seems like a classic case of a guy who's a mega star in his head, and only in his head. Rather than sound epic and huge, this sounds totally cheap and amateurish. The fact that a guy in the music business felt like these would pass for a product this far in his career says a lot about Dave's state of mind. DeFeis is known for being pompous, as has been evident for many years, but just when you thought after Bacchanalia he needed a reality check, or Nocturnes was the point where they lost it, you get this.


I never took Virgin Steele as a top selling power metal band, so something like this is pretty niche but still laughable. It's something that only someone who can't control themselves and with a lack of self-awareness would release. The Feldman comparison is particularly funny and apt, cause I remember not just when he did that, but he went on TV and performed songs with his "angels".

I implore anyone new to VS to check out their 1994-2000 material, as it's all gold (if a bit overblown by HoA 1 and 2).

I finally listened to the 3 albums. My head hurts.
Biggest complain, what is up with this sony ericsson MIDI level production shit?

Also, yes, anyone new should listen to the 90's material, like mandatory. Defeis used to be hands down an excellent songwriter. This new stuff is incredibly bland with terrible vocals and terrible production.

Could be that compared to Nocturnes, I was expecting this to be shit, so maybe my expectations were so low that I became surprised when a tiny spec of catchy melodies appeared?
But yeah, this is abysmal... Can't wait to hear their next album /s

What I find rather bizarre is how DeFeis has forgotten to write proper tunes - The Black Light Bachhanalia, despite being too much of a story telling effort than something with great music, at least featured some songs I'm convinced could have worked had they featured proper vocals and been performed by an entire band at least. Nocturnes and this boxset don't even have potential anymore - I enjoy ''Seven Dead Within'' from this first disc (minus the vocals) and the acoustic versions of ''Twilight of the Gods'' and ''Transfiguration'' from the second disc. That's literally it.

Also call me crazy but does anyone else here thinks DeFeis could still sing better if he wanted to? Lets face it, this guy has always been an experimental vocalist and I could imagine that plenty of people were scratching their heads a little once they heard, say, the ending of ''Noble Savage'' (the track, not the album) and whatnot. Pretty much all the singers that have lost their edge at one point stick to their midrange where the higher notes seemed to have vanished into oblivion. In DeFeis' case, it seems like he's convinced that any sound he makes should be put on record. For a guy that's convinced he can pull off drumming better than his actual drummer, I can really imagine he thinks he's doing fine vocally whereas his catchy vocal hooks are a thing of the past now.

EDIT, to prove a link check this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-kPxTIzCac
DeFeis sounds fine on ''Anger Never Dies'', ''West of Summer'' and ''A Greater Burning of Innocence''.

This infuriates me as well, as one can still hear som semblence of his past voice on those tracks you mentioned as well as those two acoustic tracks. Especially "A Greater Burning of Innocence" should be a clear example that he still got it, just that he for some reason decides not to sing like that anymore. Puzzling.

Those last three songs you mentioned are ironically the only ones I liked from the last album and they were on the second disk, which I find rather puzzling.

So a popular Italian metal site reviewed the set, and all I can say is that what we mentioned about positive reviews for brownie points must still be true. The rating is 68%, which is not *too* generous but still baffling considering that if we're not counting the reissued albums we're talking about three full discs packed with mostly (as in over 90%) unlistenable garbage, but the real kicker is all the knob-polishing going on in the actual review, which could have made sense for one VS's earlier, better albums but has no place here and now. I doubt the "reviewer" even actually listened to the full records, since he praises Pursino's contributions while as we all know by now there are barely any fucking guitars at all to be found on this threefold stinker.

Having finally got to listen to some of this, I was gonna say exactly that! Psychic Slaughter sounds like DeFeis is singing on top of the GuitarPro file he wrote for the song! I wonder how I'd feel about some of these songs if they had the production of The House of Atreus or Invictus instead. As it is, it's just some guy warbling mindlessly over MIDI tracks and it's abysmal to sit through.

You know, the fucking frustrating thing is that even in this hilarious fucking mess of an "album" there are still moments where DeFeis' knack for compelling melodies comes through. Psychic Slaughter is indeed a terrible joke of a song, but the bit around ~2:35 is a melodic idea that could have been really fucking cool in the right context.

I think Virgin Steele's past success probably hinged on other band members being able to exert enough marginal influence to keep DeFeis grounded, and also inserting enough supporting material around the song frameworks he came up with, to ultimately filter out the bad and amplify the good. But now there's no creative presence in the band at all other than DeFeis, any grounding and/or quality control is lost, and to top it all off DeFeis clearly can't fucking sing anymore. So, this is what we get.

Pursino is still in the band as he was all those years ago when they wrote "Blood and Gasoline" and "Agony and Shame". So what's really changed? I never thought that there was much of a collaborative process going on in VS with other band members outside of David and Ed.
David can still sing, he just needs to rein himself in a little more. Just listen to stuff like "A Greater Burning Of Innocence". He still has some charisma left to his delivery. I think the biggest challenge for Virgin Steele has been trying to maneuver a style change and do it convincingly. They weren't content with writing epic heavy metal music any longer...at least not David anyway. He talked about listening to Type O Negative and he is clearly obsessed with Led Zeppelin and has blues influences he'd rather cultivate melded together with a Gothic sensibility. It's too much, I know. Especially when your fans would rather you do what they thought you did best.

I have yet to fully explore these new songs but I'm pretty sure I won't be as dramatically disappointed as most VS fans (why is everything with this band quite theatrical??) because I want to come towards the music open to their evolution as far as songwriting goes (or lack thereof).

Well, according to the liner notes of Nocturnes, Edward Pursino also wrote several songs together with David DeFeis. It still makes me wonder how much impact he really had on that disc though - I can count like maybe 3 riffs from the top of my head that I actually liked on that one.

Apparently VS have been working on two concept albums for a while now (Yeah I know... ) One of them is suppose to be a dark autumn-like double album and the other one an epic ''in the veins of Marriage/Invictus''. I do think we'll get more ''epic metal'' music later on, regardless of what the band says but unless DeFeis comes to his senses, I doubt we'll even get some 60-65% worthy material.

I like blues and goth type stuff, so the style isn't the issue. It's the shitty production job and the fact that his vocals are literally unlistenable a lot of the time. He just seems to have left behind any pretense of restraint. It seems like "my fans like everything I do so I can just record every single idea I have with no editing."

His perception of the blues is plain shitty too.
Isn't delusion of grandeur a psychiatric condition?

No editing except, bizarrely, for throwing a ridiculous amount of autotune on just about everything. Which you'd think would be an admission of incompetence in itself, yet literally everything else says the exact opposite.

I seriously doubt Pursino's current role in the band is anything close to what it was during their "classic" years, and while the other members were certainly never "collaborators" in the sense of having equal footing, I find it hard to believe that they didn't exert any influence at all (I'm pretty sure Gilchriest wrote his own drum parts, at the very least).

What is with that growl that he keeps doing? On Nocturnes I think the only track that didn't start with it was Persephone and it's all over the new album too. Truly bizarre. The whole recording sounds faker than ever as well.

Yeah, listening to more of these tracks, it's so damn frustrating how DeFeis' melodic sensibility is clearly intact, but he's just wasting it on underproduced, half-baked garbage with an embarrassingly powerless vocal performance.

Honestly, a dude with 40 years' experience making metal still having a "melodic sensibility" is a ridiculously low bar to clear.

I don't think that's true. Plenty of veteran musicians can't write compelling melodies to save their lives. DeFeis still has a talent for it; he just doesn't have the talent for anything else, and has excised all the influence of other people that made up for that in the past.

Well, I dunno about compelling as we all have different definitions. But even bands like Priest and Sabbath whose latter-day work has never been impressive could still run circles around this in every way. And new albums from Saxon and Metal Church this year show what bands the same age as VS or older are doing right. Deep Purple, who were at it for long before VS, put out a corker of an album last year. I dunno - can't think of any old band that's gone this bad. Even the most uninspired work still at least sounds like it was made by sane men.

Are you sure?

Seriously though, it's not like the Virgin Steele is still releasing Atreus II kind of albums where there are a few really good tracks hidden in an overlong album where the overall quality has already decreased compared to their earlier stuff - if we could even get that sort of thing mixed with actual decent performances of everyone involved, I'd say VS would be a bit on the uninspired side that happens to plenty of bands that have been going on for decades but I'm with Empyreal on this one; there are old bands that are/were still kicking ass into their old age. Virgin Steele are not one of them.

Of course, it's worth noting that those bands are stil bands, VS haven't been that since... well, Atreus II. Visions of Eden still has plenty of cool stuff going on, but it feels like the demo before the album, whereas everything before that had been the product of a band. For whatever reason, Defeis seems increasingly reluctant to utilise the great, talented people around him - to the point of ousting some of them (Frank, in particular). Could this please be a wake up call? There might still be something worth salvaging here.

My feelings exactly. I hear a lot of the new stuff, and (ignoring DeFeis' ridiculous vocal experimentation) a lot of it sounds like cool demo ideas that need a band to turn them into proper songs.

Hard to say how much worth salvaging there might be, but I'm right there with you concerning Dave giving the finger to his bandmates. It's mindboggling how he obviously fails or refuses to see how disastrously he's shooting himself in the foot there.

I listened to that Wake the Dead track, and immediately pulled up "Great Sword of Flame" from Atreus I. I seriously have difficulty imagining this is the same band. Empyreal is totally right; even with bands that have fallen far in quality, you can still recognize the band's style, and the songs feel like actual songs. This is astonishingly bad. I'm honestly having trouble putting it into words. This is fucking awful.

And while it is obvious that the drums are programmed, the guy listed as the drummer in the booklet is Robert Esposito, and not Matt McKasty. Is Matt just a live drummer then?

Esposito, an Italian surname like Sasso... the plot thickens!

I have listened to all the songs. I can definitely appreciate some of them but it really is a far cry from stuff like "Great Sword Of Flame" so don't even bother comparing.
Acrobat was right about this not really being a band. Virgin Steele as a band ended after Atreus II. The best thing to have done would have been to release the albums that follow under David DeFeis' name because tbh, they are sorta solo projects...the sleeve to Visions of Eden is essentially David and a horse.

He's a poor orphaned drum machine from Napoli.

Every single one of these songs has made me gape in shock and awe, usually more than once. There are moments that actually made me cry, fam

Full Disclosure tho... I kinda enjoyed "Nutshell." It actually had a bit of a vibe and an atmosphere behind it.

The horse would have made stronger contributions than David on this.


I chuckled at that, so thank you. Everything about this fail tsunami is as depressing as it gets otherwise.

Great, now I'm imagining David going full blown Caligula and promoting the horse as an official band member.