DIO — Sacred Heart (review)

DIO — Sacred Heart album cover Album · 1985 · Heavy Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
1.5/5 ·
SouthSideoftheSky
The king of Rock ’N’ Roll? You might be thinking too much of yourself here Mr. Dio!

The previous The Last In Line album contained two of the best Dio songs ever, but the album as a whole was a definite disappointment after the very good debut. Sacred Heart continues the downward spiral for Dio. One problem that became increasingly evident with each subsequent album was the formulaic nature of the music. The opening number, The King Of Rock ‘N’ Roll, sounds like a leftover from Ronnie James’ days in Rainbow and reminds of songs by that band that also had ‘Rock ‘N’ Roll’ in the title (If You Don’t Like Rock ‘N’ Roll and Long Live Rock ‘N’ Roll, for example). I am usually very suspicious about songs with ‘Rock ‘N’ Roll’ in the title and as if one was not enough, there is yet another such song on this album in Rock ‘N’ Roll Children! For some unknown reason the opening track was recorded live or at least has audience-noise added!

Also other songs on this album contains phrases that have already featured in several earlier Dio songs, I guess the inspiration was running rather low at this point. As I said, the whole album feels formulaic and builds heavily on earlier albums. Hungry For Heaven is Sacred Heart’s counterpart to Mystery from the previous album which was itself similar to Rainbow In The Dark from the debut! These are not genuinely bad songs, but they had clearly done better ones before. The title track is, however, a very good song and easily the highlight of the album. It fills the same role as the title track and Egypt (The Chains Are On) from The Last In Line.

On the tour in support of this album, Dio would bring a large mechanical dragon which Ronnie would kill with a sword each night! This is just one of those ultra-cheesy things that have given Metal music its bad reputation. A live video from the show was later released on which you can witness this abomination! What the hell were they thinking? (Possibly that they had to compensate for the unimaginative music with theatrics?)

Sacred Heart is still a half decent album but the I-have-heard-this-before-feeling is almost omnipresent. Thankfully, things would improve considerably with the next album making Sacred Heart one of the absolute low-points of Dio’s career.
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