20th Century Masters - The Millennium Collection: The Best of Rainbow

Rainbow was two different bands before and after Ronnie James Dio’s departure, and this concise collection gives equal space to each side of the band’s image. Before he left in 1979, Dio and guitarist Ritchie Blackmore carried on one of the most fruitful frontman-guitarist partnerships in the history of heavy metal. With “Man On the Silver Mountain,” “Stargazer,” and “Kill the King” they all but wrote the blueprint for the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, and the 1977 live performance of “Mistreated” shows how easily the band’s rock heroics translated to an arena crowd. Once Dio left, Blackmore used a series of vocalists to reinvented Rainbow as an AOR band. First there was Graham Bonnet, who helped make “Since You Been Gone” one of the catchiest hard rock songs of the late ‘70s. The rest of this collection features the singing of Joe Lynn White, who sounds a bit like David Coverdale, or Survivor’s Dave Bickler and whose sensitive vocals work for “Stone Cold” and “Street of Dreams,” two of the era’s power ballads. 20th Century Masters imparts a sense of the scope and evolution of Ritchie Blackmore’s vision for the band.