David DeFeis has returned for Virgin Steele‘s fourteenth or seventeenth studio album, depending on whom you ask. Has he rediscovered the magick of the nineties, or will this turn into a Greek drama? Let’s find out.

Virgin Steele‘s career trajectory has always been a weird one. Having been founded by guitar player Jack Starr back in the early eighties, they released two very passable rock albums that ultimately failed to impress. Then Starr either quit or was fired from his own band by vocalist David DeFeis, but history on that is muddled at best. With DeFeis taking the creative reins, Virgin Steele transitioned to a more metallic sound on 1985’s Noble Savage. The songs also became more complex and layered, resulting in more epic song structures. This culminated on 1988’s Age of Consent with The Burning of Rome (Cry for Pompeii), which is still one of the best songs the band released to this date. The rest of the album, sadly, was an uneven collection of hard rock and glam, a side of the band DeFeis chose to explore even further on the subsequent Life Among the Ruins.

Then shit got real weird: somehow he managed to recompose himself and released a five-album string of flawless, utterly perfect epic heavy metal. Suddenly the songs were filled with power, speed, elaborate melodies and thought-provoking lyrics about life, death and our relationship to nature and the spiritual world. Invictus is essentially a concept album about Man versus the Gods. The House of Atreus trilogy was an elaborate retelling of the Oresteia, a trilogy of Greek tragedies by Aeschylus’. DeFeis fired on all cylinders, resulting in some of the best (power) metal albums of the nineties and beyond. After Atreus II, it took six long years before Virgin Steele returned with Visions of Eden, but something was different. The production was dire, the drums programmed, the guitars tuned down in favour of more keyboard and piano and DeFeis’ vocal histrionics took a turn for the worse, with him relying overly on high-pitched wails, screams and crooning. The two albums after that suffered from the same problems and the prolonged jam session that was Seven Devils Moonshine is, to put it mildly, not for everyone.

Confession time: I love Virgin Steele in all its forms. I love the epic heavy metal of the nineties, the cock rock that came before and the weird semi metal, piano-driven stuff David’s releasing these days. The man blazes his own musical trail and changes styles on a whim while still retaining a sound that’s instantly recognisable as Virgin Steele. The Passion of Dionysus is exactly what you would expect from a 2023 release: a long and both lyrically and musically dense concept album about Dionysus and the concept of duality. The songs are long and densely layered, the album itself clocks in near the 79-minute mark and it’s heavy on vocals and piano as opposed to crunchy riffing and pounding drums. It’s typically weird and I love it to bits. It might also be David’s best album since 2006’s Visions of Eden and that’s saying something.

If you checked out after Visions of Eden or perhaps even the Atreus albums, The Passion of Dionysus probably isn’t for you and you’ll immediately be put off after the first minutes of The Gethsemane Effect. It has all the falsetto ooooooo‘s and the random growling and yeow‘ing you’ve come to either love or hate from DeFeis. It also, however, features a few good riffs and moody guitar solos. Most of all though, the vocals take centre stage with layer upon layer of harmonies, elevating a good song to a great one. The nine-minute long You’ll Never See the Sun Again is even better, starting out as a ballad before turning into a pumping, bombastic epic that’s big on keys and some delightful guitar noodling in between choruses. After seven minutes, it basically ends were it not for an instrumental outro, complete with synthesized choirs and classically-inspired piano melodies. It feels tacked on as an afterthought of sorts, but it’s so intricately composed that it works regardless.

You’ll Never See the Sun Again also exemplifies DeFeis’ ongoing ability to compose long, multi-faceted tracks that still somehow cohere. The Ritual of Descent is well over twelve minutes long and is basically four songs rolled into one, weaving back and forth from one part to another. Tempos regularly change, the general flow of a section will suddenly be halted so the song can take a new and unexpected turn before returning to an earlier section. It’s progressive material that demands the listener’s attention and a growing familiarity with the material and that’s part of the fun of Virgin Steele these days: it’s not bite-sized power metal. DeFeis makes you work for it until you either get it or give up. The Passion of Dionysus features more straight-forward “power metal” songs in A Song of Possession and Black Earth and Blood, both big on speed and huge layers of vocal harmonies. Songs like these help immensely in keeping the pace and offer a moment of brevity in between the more challenging tracks. The album ends with four songs that are more balladesque than what came before, with only I Will Fear No Man for I Am a God featuring some meaty guitar riffs and solos.

The Passion of Dionysus is modern day Virgin Steele at its best and most intricate. It is also David DeFeis doing what he wants, exactly how he wants it. Unfortunately, this means that it once again disappoints in the production department, lacking a certain oomph. The songs range from good to fantastic and the album features some of the best melodies and harmonies DeFeis has ever written, but the digital drums and bass make some parts fall flat whereas proper instrumentation would otherwise elevate them. Some would say the album also lacks in the guitar department, but people tend to forget that Virgin Steele is not a metal band per se. All of the material is written for piano and vocals in the first place and are then coloured in with all the other elements, with guitars not being the main instrument but rather employed to emphasize and accentuate where needed. If you can live with that, can take the production values for granted and are willing to put in the effort, there is one hell of an album to be found here.

Label: SPV Steamhammer
Buy it here: http://shop.steamhammer.de/products/741521-virgin-steele-the-passion-of-dionysus

Track listing:

1. The Gethsemane Effect (07:08)
2. You’ll Never See the Sun Again (09:20)
3. A Song of Possession (05:51)
4. The Ritual of Descent (12:41)
5. Spiritual Warfare (07:50)
6. Black Earth and Blood (02:24)
7. The Passion of Dionysus (08:09)
8. To Bind and Kill a God (08:18)
9. Unio Mystica (09:15)
10. I Will Fear No Man for I Am a God (08:46)

Line-up:

• David DeFeis – vocals, keyboards, bass, orchestrations, drum programming
• Edward Pursino – guitars
• Joshua Block – guitars

Review by RP