Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Memories of Rock gigs, the nights in which you went as a crowd to have pre-planned fun and to toast the future of the band you had made your way, perhaps for a couple of hundred miles, to see, or the strange sensation of finding yourself alone in a crowded auditorium, wide-eyed and feeling the passion steam roller through you as if you were the only person on the planet that it had managed to ignore all your life and was now Hell bent on making sure you were blessed with the memory forever.
Memories are special, good ones, amazing ones, lift us upwards, they want to make us touch the stars and re-live every moment, take part in the scene once more, feel the energy, touch the pulse and relish the heat and the sweat, the damnation and the salvation that our parents and companion warned us about, that somewhere over the Rainbow there is a perfect live recording in which to wallow and aid that recollection of events that made you love the band and that you dreamt of all the way home.
In Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow’s Memories In Rock II, that feeling of capturing the night in question is a universal truth in action, of a godfather of the genre and those that make the evening possible be recognised once again for the sense of purpose they brought to many studio albums, to many venues and the love that resides in a fan’s heart.
Somewhere over that coloured spectrum of light lays Ritchie Blackmore and one of the bands that he helped shape the Rock genre with, in Rainbow, arguably, the presence of the songs that have breathed life and shook dust from the body of collected apathy that often creeps in when the world no longer seems to want to understand just how vital a beautifully poised and rhythmic pulse actually is, have been outrageous and beneficial. Whilst Memories In Rock II may seem like a Greatest Hits album in all but name, what comes across is the immersion into the chaos, the arc lights, and the vision of great music played with intentional grace and offering the loud screams of a guitar an outlet in which to live through the listener.
In songs that caress the two C.D. set such as I Surrender, Since You’ve Been Gone, Soldier of Fortune, Perfect Strangers, Child In Time, Stargazer, Black Night, Temple of the King and the bonus track single released in 2018, Waiting For A Sign, Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow don’t just fill in the cracks of the listener’s memory of a particular evening in question, they enhance it, they make sure that the days in which the abandonment of such tales and riffs in favour of the scatterbrained obsessive one sentence lyric is thankfully a long way off.
Somewhere over that rainbow, skies are really blue and filled with the thunderous roar of approval of one of Rock’s most endearing and enduring bands.
Ian D. Hall