After listening to this CD, I've come to the conclusion that while the 80s did produce a lot of great bands, Raven is not among them. I was never a huge Raven fan - "Hung Drawn & Quartered" was a fucking brilliant track, but I was never very familiar with most of their other stuff...and now that I've heard "Live At The Inferno", I have ZERO interest in changing this fact. The problem is that Raven write some utterly fucking boring songs that sound a little too much like Van Halen for my liking (albeit more "metal" and less "American rock"), and I fucking HATE Van Halen with an almighty passion. There's nothing here that appeal to me in any way : the song writing is generic, the playing is generic, and the vocals are generic - about the only thing that isn't generic is the drummers wardrobe, and it's just plain silly (what's with the helmet ? Afraid the audience might start throwing bricks at you ?). To be fair though, I could have sworn I heard one or two half decent riffs, but not enough to make up for the remaining 70+ minutes of shite it was mixed in with.

That's really all that has to be said about this...it's just so completely uninteresting to me that I can't even be bothered to waste my time thinking of clever ways to say "pass this one up". If you're a Raven fan, then you probably already have this in your collection - but if you're like me and not very familiar with the band, take my advice and keep it that way...you'd be much better off picking up some old Judas Priest or Saxon...

© 2000 chorazaim