Sentinel Daily editor Scott Adams officially gave up on David DeFeis and Virgin Steele after reviewing the band’s five CD epic box set Seven Devils Moonshine about five years ago; Still scarred from the effects, he passed the band’s new album, The Passion of Dionysus, to me for comment. So here goes…

Like the boss man, I’m a big fan of old – by which I mean Jack Starr era – VS, and obviously those days are long gone, never to return. So is there anything here for longterm fans to find solace in?

I’d lost contact with the band’s output before being asked to review this, so gave the last few albums a spin by way of homework before immersing myself in … Dionysus. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t completely bewildered by what was going on, so the first thing to note here is that, for the most part, the songwriting on the new album is actually pretty solid.

I doubt whether our or anybody else’s comments have penetrated the self-possessed DeFeis’s carapace, but, in all honesty, songs like the superb, seventies tinged The Ritual of Descent are actually just straightforward, well written melodic rock songs, utterly bereft of the weird production and ‘mannered’ vocal tics which have littered recent releases. In short – the sort of songs Virgin Steele fans have been crying out for for some while…

Sure, some negatives still remain and need to be addressed: the production is still rotten, and guitarists Edward Pursino and Josh Block don’t get nearly enough room to strut their stuff, but this nowhere near as bad as you may have feared. The Ritual of Descent sounds like a ‘normal’ band firing on all cylinders – praise the Gods for that!

At over seventy five minutes in length it’s probably too much to expect that the band can hold every song together – they don’t – but this is such a move back into the right direction that that fact really doesn’t matter. Virgin Steele have taken great steps to get back among the living here, and that alone is a fact worthy of bacchanalian celebration…

The Passion of Dionysus releases on June 30th.