It's been years since I've really listened to much Dio, and after converting my vinyls of Sacred Heart and Dream Evil to mp3 got me in the mood to listen through all the albums I have.

I own the albums from Holy Diver to Strange Highways, and I'm at Lock Up the Wolves right now. It's been way too long, and I ended up loving The Last in Line a lot more than I remember. Still think that Lock Up the Wolves and Strange Highways are both seriously underrated.

One of the best hooks:


and the bass on Strange Highways is so damn good:

Strange Highways and Dehumanizer are bombass sister records.

This album was fun and interesting, but I think that the album from Sectioned (a band with nearly all the same members) was way better. Frontierer just sounds so same-y after awhile.

Monte Pittman is interesting. He's known for being a session guitarist with Madonna, but some of his solo stuff is pretty fun in a "Megadeth circa 1992" sorta way.

Not bad. At least they seem to have some actually memorable ides. Something as rare as a unicorn in metal circles.

Definitely, and I think Strange Highways shows that Dio wasn't finished with that sound that Sabbath had on Dehumanizer. Strange Highways could've easily been the next Sabbath album and would sound right at home.

My two theories are that either Dio didn't have any ideas for his next record so he swiped Dehumanizer's sound, or Dio wanted to go RLY heavy and Tony Iommi was like "But we don't do that anymore" and Dio was like "Shut up ***got" and got so wound up he recorded another album just like it.

I think this is most likely. If he was out of ideas and just took the sound of Dehumanizer, Strange Highways would've probably sounded a lot more uninspired. Strange Highways is anything but. Probably my favorite Dio album tbh.

This is a TERRIBLE take

Metal is chock full of new bands and artists making unique, memorable, forward thinking music.

I've spent no small amount of time looking for good bands over the years. I used to think of myself as a fan of metal first and foremost. I sort of ended up realizing I was getting tired of most metal and these days it's incredibly hard for me to find any bands that I can care about at all.

In other genres, it's downright easy. So I think I'm just more or less done with metal, aside from the odd exception. I do still love several bands and sometimes even look for new stuff. I just almost never find anything worth my while.

So, me thinking most metal is boring and samey has some personal context.