DIO — Dream Evil (review)

Album · 1987 · Heavy Metal

3.5/5 · 2010-05-11
SouthSideoftheSky

Not quite a “dream album”, but a very good album about dreams!

After the almost complete disaster that was Sacred Heart, Dio regained their strengths for this follow up. While the music is still a bit formulaic in nature, the band seems to have received a new boost of energy and they deliver the most inspired set of songs since Holy Diver. Overall, the sound of Dream Evil is darker and slightly less commercial than previous albums.

Guitarist Vivian Campbell who played on Dio’s first three albums was here replaced with Craig Goldy but otherwise the line-up remained the same with Jimmy Bain, Vinny Appice and Claude Schnell on bass, drums and keyboards respectively. Goldy proved to be a good choice and maybe it was his presence that rejuvenated the band or maybe it was just the fact that they took more time to prepare this album compared to previous albums? Even the cover art is inspired this time depicting a sleeping child (‘dream child’?) surrounded by all kinds of creepy objects and creatures, supposedly the contents of the child’s evil dreams (‘the dark that you find in the back of your mind’). Personally, I like this picture better than the iconic Holy Diver cover and it has a connection to the contents as well.

The album opens with another up tempo Stand Up And Shout-like song in Night People that sets the scene very well for the rest of the album. This is followed by the melodic title track about ‘evil’ dreams that is so well depicted on the cover. I think that this album is at least partly conceptual, though not all songs fit into the concept of dreams in any obvious way. Sunset Superman does however seem to be somewhat thematically connected considering that its opening line is “The night has a thousand eyes, but he moves in only places where the eyes can never be”. While otherwise a good song, the chorus of Sunset Superman is really tedious and repetitive. I have always felt that this song would deserve a better chorus.

All The Fools Sailed Away is the album’s highlight for me and one of my all time Dio favourites. This rather adventurous song runs for over seven minutes which is rather long by Dio standards and contains a quite brilliant middle section with a short keyboard solo and great guitar work. The opening is particularly captivating when Ronnie sings “There's perfect harmony in the rising and the falling of the sea, and as we sail along I never fail to be astounded by the things we'll do for promises… and a song” followed by the main riff of the song. Even this song might be made to fit into the concept of dreams. Consider in particular the following passage “We bring you fantasy, we bring you pain. It's your one great chance for a miracle. Or we will disappear, never to be seen again”. What is it that brings fantasy and pain and then disappears never to be seen again if not our dreams? The chorus itself could be interpreted as “sailing off” into the land of dreams, which is, after all, something that all of us “fools” do every night!

I will not attempt interpretations of all the songs, but even Naked In The Rain has a line about dreams in “Take aim and blow all the dreams away”. Otherwise, it could perhaps be interpreted as an existential song about mankind’s desolate situation in this world. Overlove pretty much explains itself and is the weakest song of the album, in my opinion. Again the chorus is rather tedious and repetitive.

I Could Have Been A Dreamer is about the type of dreams that we have when we are awake and this song works quite well as a kind of melodic ballad. Faces In The Window returns to the main lyrical theme and could again be taken to refer to something from the cover picture, namely the face of the devil in the window above the bed (which is, of course, the figure that is also depicted on the covers of Holy Diver and The Last In Line). This song also contains the phrases “Sleep comes slowly” and “Creations of the mind” that obviously connects it thematically to the first couple of songs.

It doesn’t really matter whether this album was intended as a (semi-)conceptual album or not because it is up to the listener to make his own interpretation and I am quite sure that Ronnie would agree with me on that. To these ears this album contains some of Ronnie James Dio’s most intelligent lyrics (despite some slightly cheesy passages that I have mostly ignored).

As you probably have guessed by now, I like this album a lot more than the previous two and I even think it is up to par with Holy Diver! Admitedly, there are a couple of weak moments too but they are mostly well disguised behind the stronger moments.