I’m not a big fan of the most recent Virgin Steele album Nocturnes Of Hellfire & Damnation but I still occasionally hanker for it. The opener Lucifer’s Hammer is classic chest-beating metal and Persephone is a grand retelling of the Greek myth that ranks up with the band’s best material. And do any of you remember the mysteriously anonymous 80s speed metal band Exorcist? Well, it turns out they were Virgin Steele all along and on this album they finally own up to it, reworking two Exorcist songs Queen Of The Dead and Black Mass in power metal fashion. It’s great stuff and a lot more rifftastic than the preceding VS album The Black Light Bacchanalia. But that album had a romantic, overblown grandiosity that proved fascinating and rewarding and Nocturnes Of Hellfire & Damnation has none of that richness or consistency. The shifts from the Exorcist tracks to piano balladry like Hymns To Damnation to bizarre raunch metal like Demolition Queen and Glamour make for a disjointed listen and the overlong arrangements and dark, moody atmosphere means promising tracks like Delirium and Devilhead come across as dreary. If you’re a Virgin Steele acolyte like me there are just enough bright spots here to make it worth your time but everyone else will find Nocturnes a long, colourless night that will most likely send them to sleep.
HEAVY METAL OVERLOAD 
I don’t recall Exorcist (but I do find it interesting when bands perform/authors write under different identities) – Impressive that they kept their pseudonym secret for 30 years!
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Pretty obscure band. I think people generally suspected it was them but doing these songs here was the first official admission I believe!
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I wonder why they changed their name. Was it do to the movie of the same name? New label? Or just weren’t successful so they tried something different?
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I believe it was label problems. They didn’t want to record for their label but couldn’t record as Virgin Steele for anyone else. So they did a few secret projects… Exorcist, one album with Piledriver and even pretended to be an all-girl band called Original Sin at one point!
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That is awesome. I love those kind of stories. And the fact that they pretended to be an all girl band, makes me want to check them out now even though I know it won’t be my type of music.
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The singer was a girl at least! But the band was all dudes… you might like it. It’s fairly trad kinda metal. The album was called Sin Will Find You Out.
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Still only ever bought the one album of theirs and that was it. Than again it was the 80’s and it was always an avalanche of tunes and some stuff would fall by the wayside…
Brent Jensen in hs ‘No Sleep Til Sudbury” book gives an excellent encounter of meeting Jack Starr in which I asked him about it in my “10 Questions With..’ segment
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The first two albums aren’t the best. I think they got better when Ed Pursino joined. They were great in the 90s. When all the classic bands were going tits up, Virgin Steele were AMAZING.
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Actually the two albums with Jack Starr are getting reissued next month!
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That’s all a bit bizarre. Strikes me that those are just the Virgin Steele aliases we know about, there may be many more out there.
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It’s hard to know the extent of the infiltration but it may be the only explanation for ridiculous acts like “Poison Idea” “Leonard Cohen” and “Yazz’.
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I have never seen Virgin Steele and the Pet Shop Boys in the same room together. Just saying.
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Can it be true? Do you think they’re trying to put the Homeric into the Homoerotic?
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I laughed so hard at this stuff came out of my nose. I may do a cover version of this comment at some appropriate point.
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You must have an album in the 1537(+) that could use a joke like that!
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I can’t afford the royalties! I’m still paying off ‘Let It USB’.
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Bugger. I need all the royalties I can get. Kids just keep downloading my jokes for free these days.
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