Ghost Harvest - Vintage I: Black Wine for Mourning

The most under rated power/ heavy metal band on the planet earth, Virgin Steele has just put out a box set called Seven Devils Moonshine. Included is a new release called Ghost Harvest (The Spectral Vintage Sessions) Vintage 1 – Black Wine for Mourning. Black Wine for Mourning features the one of the best vocalists on the planet, David DeFeis, two and a half octaves of excellence. Virgin Steele has evolved into much more then just a typical heavy / power metal band. This album is more on the heavy metal/ Hard Rock side with touches of power, prog, blues and classical. David has defied the odds and this finely aged song writer is getting better with age. It is possible that the preservation of David's great voice is due to Virgin Steele's lack of commercial success and the grind this can put on ones voice.

Let's continue the controversy with this. The last Manowar album The Lord of Steel has been bashed on by haters and fans that have hit the wall and refused to give it a fair shake. Manowar's The Lord of Steel is one of the most solid/ pound for pound Manowar albums ever made. Not Manowar's best, but without a doubt top 5. This 2018 Virgin Steele release Ghost Harvest (The Spectral Vintage Sessions) Vintage 1 – Black Wine for Mourning is Virgin Steele's version of Manowar's The Lord of Steel. Start throwing the rocks!

The album starts off with a track that is destined to be a Steele classic, Seven Dead Within is a track that includes all of the for mentioned genres. The track is classic Virgin Steele Infused with blues and classical melodies. Track #2 Green Dusk Blues and Hearts on Fire are examples of how Dave is the full package when it comes to orchestration and vocals. His vocal melodies are second to none. Princess Amy is a blues infused heavy metal track. Some of the tracks featured in the middle of this album including Princess Amy (track 10) are as solid are Steele Tracks, remember this is may be the finest 2018 in it's genre, but falls a little short of being Metal album of the year . Track #8 Feral is one of those tracks (like the Heaven and Hell era) that everything seems to come together, drums, guitars keys and vocal working like a well oiled machine.

Classical masterpieces like Psychic Slaughter would have Wagner banging his head. Wagner would love David's orchestration.
This album also includes Bluesy / Heavy tracks like Justine, a vocal masterpiece. Excellent ending to the story with remakes of Chris Isaak's Wicked Game and Little Wing by Hendrix . Like Jorn, David is able to make a pop rock song as metal as it gets.

Out of all of the power/ heavy metal elite, because of consistency both Manowar and Virgin Steele in the last 15 years have left the so called elite in the dust. This album comes in 2 forms. Individual release and a very affordable box set that includes 2 earlier releases and ton of remakes! Thumbs up for making the re-issues affordable.

Metal Archives wanted more when it came to my original draft, that was a gift. I was able to deconstruct this album from beginning to end. The Rating went from 82 to 85%. Really there is nothing else that can be said about this album except if you like talent then this albums is for you. I caught that Rock. Frank THE MORBID ONE The Metal Authority Family

Full disclosure, I've tried twice to listen to this in one sitting and couldn't do it. I had to take a break just to make it to the end of this album by the once-great Virgin Steele, the authors of such luminous works as The Marriage Of Heaven & Hell. It's actually almost unbelievable that I'm writing this review, as even latter-day albums like The Black Light Bacchanalia at least had some redeeming qualities. But here we are, with the massive five-album set they've put out this year. I had originally planned to review all of it, but after hearing this one, I guess I'm just not that strong.

Ghost Harvest: Black Wine for Mourning isn't much of a metal album, more focused on bluesy pianos and drawling rock riffs and slow, soulful leads - that's not the issue here. The issue is that the songwriting has taken a long slow leap off a cliff into complete inanity. It's almost difficult to even describe how dull this is; the long stretches of lounge-y pianos and half-ballad parts. If there were any affecting hooks, any catchy moments that actually felt like songs more than idiotic jam sessions played at a third-rate hotel in uptown New York at 2 a.m., then it might be salvageable... lord knows I'm a sucker for a good ballad. But this stuff just goes on and on. There's really no sense of direction, no indication that these songs are heading anywhere. It's like being lost in some sort of sonic desert.

And the vocals. Holy fucking hell. David DeFeis, once a man I would've said was one of the greatest metal singers on the planet, is borderline unlistenable on this. The tooth-and-nail aggression he once had is long gone. Now he just caterwauls and wails his way through these songs in a painful manner. Sometimes he shrieks real high, seemingly just to show he still can - not only are these parts totally incongruous with the somnolent music on display, they're also reminiscent of a cat with laryngitis being stabbed to death in an alley. Listen to the completely abominable "Psychic Slaughter," the worst song this band has ever recorded. I really cannot fathom why he thought this was acceptable to release, or who he thought would enjoy this.

It really just speaks to the larger issue, which is that his ego seems to be the driving force here. It seems to have robbed him of any restraint. The main mindset this whole thing was written and recorded under seems to be "my fans love everything I do, so I'll just put every single idea I have onto record, no editing or filtering at all!" It's pure delusion. This stuff is basically a bad bedroom vanity project, the kind of thing that normally would be relegated to some quaint oddity distributed to friends and family in the area. But because of this band's pedigree, we're now faced with this and it's tough to look away.

Sometimes you get a fairly good solo or a nice mellow piano moment. But honestly, this is a band that has been around for 40 years. The fact that they can string together a pleasing melody or three over 80 fucking minutes of this album is barely praise. If you do anything for 40 years and can still perform the task competently, that's not a reason for praise - that's just doing what you've always shown you can. Any other band that has been around as long as Virgin Steele, no matter how droll and uninspired they might get, can run circles around this nonsense.

This is basically St. Anger level bad - just a cacophonous mess, and it baffles and intrigues me what exactly happened to allow this to go forward as-is, with even the production being so weak and tinny. They couldn't get even that right. It's almost a goddamn marvel, how utterly they failed.