Ace Audio: "Stargazer" - Rainbow

Considering my previous posts, I figured it was time for me to do a song that I liked. Pat Boone was a lot worse than I thought he would be and I really don't feel like doing another Auditory Abomination for now. Listening to good music really helps me relax after an atrocity of a song like Pat Boone's "Smoke on the Water", it often gets me into a mindset to do an Abomination.

The song begins with one of the greatest drum lines in heavy metal history. This drum line is up there with songs like "Your Betrayal" and "L'Enfant Sauvage", and it is followed by a great opening riff. The opening of this song is awesome, it really does give of a fantasy sound, which yeah, Rainbow was one of the first Power Metal bands. They focused a lot more on fantasy inspired lyrics and lighter guitar work. People often point to Dio as the influential Power Metal band, especially with the album Holy Diver, but I would choose Rainbow.

And hey, speaking of Dio, that is indeed Ronnie James Dio on vocal work. This was the band he did after Elf but before Black Sabbath. As usual his vocal work is incredible, especially those long notes, hot damn I would kill to have a singing voice like Dio's, it's just so majestic, it invokes power, royalty and force, there is no doubt why he is one of the greatest heavy metal vocalists of all time.

I think my favourite thing about the song as a whole is the story within the lyrics. The song is about this group of workers who build this large tower of stone for this wizard who believes he can fly. The lyrics really do focus on the hardship of it all, with the chorus having lyrics like "In the heat and the rain/With whips and chains/Just to see him fly/So many died", it really hits home how rough the situation must be for the workers. Although, I have learned a little interesting thing about the construction of the pyramids, which was probably an inspiration for this song, apparently the construction of the pyramids was seen as holy work and it was a great honour to build them, maybe that is the same thing here.

Although, much like with "Octavarium" my favourite part of the whole is not my favourite piece. My favourite piece of the song if the guitar solo. Oh sweet Dio on a throne of gold and holy fire surrounded by succubi this solo kicks ass. It's just jaw dropping, sometimes when I hear it, I can imagine myself flying over a forest away from a cascading waterfall beneath an orange sky with a flaming rainbow to top it all off. When it ends, I just see the entire scene that the song set up, the large tower of stone, the stargazer, the workers, the dead bodies with their corpses destroyed by heat and rain. The imagery of this song is very clear, you can just picture all of the parts of the scene, and each vision is different, I myself often see the seen in a forest, but another may see it in a desert, or a mountain, I don't think very many other songs do this, create images that are different to other people, the song gives enough details to make the scene easy enough to picture, but not too much as to be overtly specific.

The song ends with a bit of a downer, there is a good metaphor in this song. The tower is built, as high as it can go and the wizard jumps, but instead of rising, he falls and dies. He had a vision, a dream and he went for it, but failed, or alternatively, he had all of this power and influence and it ultimately lead to his demise. Not a whole lot of songs I know of have these different interpretations, I mean I know people can interpret any song different from another, but with a song like "Purple Haze" there was really only two meanings attributed to the song, and then there are songs like "Bohemian Rhapsody" and "Loser" that are given meaning without actually having any. Personally, I see it as the latter, the wizard had all of this power, all this influence and he believed what he was doing was for the greater good or was essentially a holy quest, but what happened was he plummeted towards the ground and had no more power or influence, a metaphor for falling out of power and the danger of gaining to much of it, but that's just my interpretation of it.

I don't know what else I have to say, this is one of my favourite songs of all time, up somewhere in my top 20, top 15 at least. Everything about this song works, from the guitar, to the drums, to the vocals, to the lyrics to everything. What I would give to see this live.

I'm the Entity of Darkness, and Dio, Rock in Peace man. \m/