Customer Reviews

Catch the Rainbow

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I am a huge Rainbow fan, with my favourite singers being Dio and Graham Bonnet. I also love blackmore's style. With this tribute album i thought the band did pretty good. But the singer ruined the whole lot for me. It was screechy, shakey, all over the place and just downright horrible. Not saying I could do any better but im not the one creating a tribute album here. When I listen to the original version of catch the rainbow, i feel relaxed and peaceful. When I heard this version i had to turn it off straight away, it was just an utter joke. But this is just my opinion.

This Rainbow tribute album has the absolute best cover version of "Kill the King." Uli Kusch, former drummer for the excellent German power metal band Helloween and now with Masterplan, puts on a drumming clinic! He is perhaps the most talented skins man on the scene today. Lovingly recorded by a crew of brilliant musicians, this album smokes from the opening crush of "Kill the King" to the closing bombast of "Still I'm Sad," featuring Primal Fear's Ralf Scheepers on vocals.

These are very good note-for-note carbon copies of a selection of Rainbow songs which is actually a better representation of Rainbow's greatest hits than the selection on the Rainbow's greatest hits CD. That said, it suffers from the same shortcoming that many "tribute" albums suffer from - the musicians try to perform carbon copies of the originals rather than putting their own "stamp" on them or doing something at least a little bit different with them. Invariably, the originals are better, so why bother? The guitar solos are not quite as good, at times the drumming falls short (too much rapid tapping on the bass-drum foot-pedal: sounds amatuerish), and the vocalist, although very good, is no Ronnie James Dio (although the vocalist who does Joe Lynn Turner sounds so much like Turner you would swear it was Turner himself!). My two favorite songs are the only songs where the musicians have actually done something different with them: "Catch the Rainbow" and "Rainbow Eyes". On the original "Catch the Rainbow", a simple repeating melody on guitar just plays over and over again as the song fades out. Here the guitarist adds completely different solos both in the middle and at the fade - its a refreshing change. I LOVE what was done to "Rainbow Eyes": a great bluesy-type solo is added in the middle and at the end several solos play different variations on the basic melody; on the original there is no solo in the middle and at the end, a simple melody played on a violin with no variation just repeats as it fades out. The tribute version is actually an IMPROVEMENT over the original! In summary, I have mixed feelings about this album. It is very well performed by very competent musicians from mostly the Metal bands Helloween and Gamma Ray, along with a few others. I love the SELECTION of songs, and it doesn't sound like a bunch of bad outtakes like on the Deep Purple tribute CD; it sounds more like alternate versions of songs done by Rainbow itself. This project had a lot of promise but would have been better had the musicians varied things up a bit and put their own stamp or personality on the songs.

This is an interesting tribute album. It's essentially a Helloween family tribute to Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow. Put together by (then) Helloween drummer Uli Kusch, who handles drums on all tracks, Catch the Rainbow also features Helloween alumni Roland Grapow, Michael Weikath and Andi Deris, plus Gamma Ray members Henjo Richter, Uwe Wessel and Ralf Scheepers (now with Primal Fear of course), among others in the German metal community.

This is a pretty effective tribute to a legendary band. Most songs come from the Dio era of Rainbow, which is perfectly appropriate for a bunch of German power metallers, though there are a couple of later day Rainbow songs. Metalium frontman Henning (Henne) Basse handles vocals for all but three songs, and while he does a perfectly good job I'd like to have seen a bit more variety. Andi Deris did a great job on "Catch the Rainbow" and Ralf Scheepers nailed "Still I'm Sad," which was a bit of a surprise given his Halford-esque voice. Obviously none of the vocalists come close to the late Ronnie James Dio (RIP), but I always love hearing new versions of the classic Dio-era Rainbow songs.

The whole album is well-executed and is a respectful tribute to Rainbow. The musicians involved stick pretty close to the originals, but there is definitely a German power metal spin on the songs. If you're a power metal fan or an open-minded Rainbow fan, you should check this one out.

These are very good note-for-note carbon copies of a selection of Rainbow songs which is actually a better representation of Rainbow's greatest hits than the selection on the Rainbow's greatest hits CD. That said, it suffers from the same shortcoming that many "tribute" albums suffer from - the musicians try to perform carbon copies of the originals rather than putting their own "stamp" on them or doing something at least a little bit different with them. Invariably, the originals are better, so why bother? The guitar solos are not quite as good, at times the drumming falls short (too much rapid tapping on the bass-drum foot-pedal: sounds amatuerish), and the vocalist, although very good, is no Ronnie James Dio (although the vocalist who does Joe Lynn Turner sounds so much like Turner you would swear it was Turner himself!). My two favorite songs are the only songs where the musicians have actually done something different with them: "Catch the Rainbow" and "Rainbow Eyes". On the original "Catch the Rainbow", a simple repeating melody on guitar just plays over and over again as the song fades out. Here the guitarist adds completely different solos both in the middle and at the fade - its a refreshing change. I LOVE what was done to "Rainbow Eyes": a great bluesy-type solo is added in the middle and at the end several solos play different variations on the basic melody; on the original there is no solo in the middle and at the end, a simple melody played on a violin with no variation just repeats as it fades out. The tribute version is actually an IMPROVEMENT over the original! In summary, I have mixed feelings about this album. It is very well performed by very competent musicians from mostly the Metal bands Helloween and Gamma Ray, along with a few others. I love the SELECTION of songs, and it doesn't sound like a bunch of bad outtakes like on the Deep Purple tribute CD; it sounds more like alternate versions of songs done by Rainbow itself. This project had a lot of promise but would have been better had the musicians varied things up a bit and put their own stamp or personality on the songs.

If you like Rainbow and you wish it was played in a more heavy metal mode - check this out. A tribute album of early Rainbow classics such as 'Stargazer' and 'Man on the Siver Mountain' given a harder going-over. Members of German metal bands such as Helloween, Gamma Ray and others put their stamp on the songs and actual do a good job in several places. Unfortunately they couldn't hit all the notes (drummer on 'Stargazer' definitely can't touch the late,great Cozy Powell.) If you must have every recorded version of Stargazer, here's another one.

this is an exelent recording and i think that ritchie would be proud to have such good musicians follow in his footsteps. but the fact is that it aint no ritchie, and although it is full of good carbon copies nothing can compare to the pure soul of ritchie blackmore