Music Check-in for the week of 3/5/2021

 Last week was, indeed, one of the busiest release days I’ve ever been through, I’m still not done but I will be much closer at 9:00 pm tonight, in time to reload.  There were some great surprises on the Alice Cooper album, the song originally about the pandemic has been reworked to discuss depression in general, even including the suicide hotline phone number at the end.  I’ve sometimes even had to call that number (though not in years, thankfully), not in regards to the pandemic, but to the “politicians” who made it so much worse than it needed to be/could’ve been.  There was also a humorous song called "Drunk and In Love" which either featured Alice Cooper playing harmonica (a rare thing since the early 70s albums) or it was possibly Ozzy Osbourne doing a harmonica cameo, like on Alice's "Along Came A Spider" album.  According to Wikipedia just now, it was Alice himself, though they say "harp" when the actual term is "mouth harp."  On a happier note, Carrie Underwood released a duet with CeCe Winans of “Great Is Thy Faithfulness,” and I can already tell Carrie’s Gospel album will be either one of my favorite or my outright favorite album this year.  It almost serves as a sibling to Bon Jovi’s 2020 album, declaring God’s love alongside Bon Jovi’s declarations of a love beyond us that can help us with our problems and burdens and cries for justice for the victimized, the downtrodden and the purposefully neglected.  This music inspired me to doodle the faces of LGBTQ+ characters Yang, Blake, Byleth, Edelgard, Petra and Dorothea and write under it “Love IS Love,” “I can’t but LUV CAN” (a lyric from one of the Bon Jovi songs about how I may be limited, but love has no such limits and can heal every wound) and a simple treat that I feel came from the Highest; “The Sun just came out.”  This is why I live; I want to reconcile the Church and the LGBTQ+ community.  So I take video game screenshots, write fan fictions and post them on the Internet to show that I’m willing to listen and help however I can and fight however I know how.  Here, in fact, is what I drew/wrote:

 

 

There was also good rocking from the live Don Airey album, to the point I bought the whole MP3 album for easy access.  It was a well-constructed show and the band even covered Whitesnake’s “Is This Love?” apparently because Airey was the keyboardist on the original, I looked that up.  Julien Baker and Ally Venable’s albums were also good examples of singer/songwriter and blues as done by women and Ann Wilson of Heart fame released an awesome new single called “The Hammer.”  Joseph Williams and Steve Lukather’s version of “If I Fell” was also an awesome new Beatles cover.  Lauren Daigle's "Hold On To Me" was also a great new Gospel song and possibly an indicator of an upcoming album.

 

This week has two major releases from one band, one of these is a 40^th anniversary re-release.

 

Black Sabbath-Heaven and Hell and Mob Rules Deluxe Editions: Black Sabbath is re-releasing the first two Ronnie James Dio-sung albums with bonus tracks, including samples of live performances from 1980, 1981 and 1982.  These include a performance in 1980 at Hartford, CT, a New Year’s Eve 1981 at the Hammersmith Odeon and a 1982 performance in Portland, OR.  Only the Portland performance is in full, the others are just tracks that relate to the album they’re on (Live versions of Heaven and Hell tracks from both of the other performances are on the Heaven and Hell Deluxe Edition, while the Odeon live performances of Mob Rules tracks are on that one).  Hammersmith Odeon’s performance was available in full on an older Deluxe Edition of Mob Rules and it was a good performance, the only major disappointment is that they’ve cut that version’s performance of Ronnie singing the Sabbath classic “Children of the Grave,” so hopefully the Portland one is just as good.  We shall soon see, or rather, hear, soon.