Customer Reviews
Best Ever
More than 15 years later, It is still my favorite album. It was my favorite album when it was released. Tonight He Grins Again, If I Go Away, and Believe are the highlights, but there is no filler on Streets. At the risk of repeating the numerous other reviews, this, in my opinion, is the greatest album ever written. .
Someone operate on this opera - 2.5 stars
One was called Fight For The Rock and the title pretty much tells you all you need to know, an album that I never really gave much time to. To my way of thinking the awesome metal band that were Savatage made two clunkers. Admittedly some of their albums may not have appealed to the tastes of all their fan base but ultimately even the albums the you didn't like you still respected for the talent on display. Except for this one, the only other clunker other than FFTR in the entire Savatage back catalogue (well OK Poets and Madmen comes close).
My reasons for one of my rare outbursts against one of my favourite metal bands of the 80's and 90's are as follows.
1) Overlong songs that outstay their welcome. In order to balance the mellow and more grandiose elements of this album the metal has to be spot on and well weighted. Here it isn't - the more metal tunes such as Jesus Saves and Agony Ecstasy not allowed to exist as pure face melters, the band trying to do too much within the confines of one song.
2) Rather silly forced concepts - by that I mean that this album betrayed the first signs that Savatage really didn't have anything much to say and therefore felt the need to try and forcefully hang what tunes they had around a concept regardless of whether it worked or not. Some of the tunes here such as Believe are intensely beautiful. And as such they have no need to be included in some sort of faux loss/redemption shtick of a story line. I mean just listening to Believe - the thing has more emotion than your average pop fool can put into an entire album, Olivas' vocals just bleeding all over the place with raw emotion so strong I have no idea what the guy was thinking about when he was laying his vocal tracks. But whatever place he put himself to sing that is a place I don't ever want to go. My point being that trying to collate tunes into a story line either works or it doesn't. On the bands brilliant Dead Winter Dead it worked. Here the concept album doesn't work.
3) Lack of flow. One of the worst things a concept album can be guilty of is poor flow. And this thing just doesn't flow whatsoever.
As for the actual performances here the whole album seems restrained in a not good way as the listener gets the feeling that some of the nuances here are pretty forced (do you see a trend emerging?) And I really feel that this album should be viewed - if at all - as a sort of stepping stone towards the bands ability to send forth quality concept albums later in their career as this album is almost like a bands debut offering, all tentative and lacking in confidence. Which is one thing this band never sounded like even back on their debut.
But all up perhaps I've been a touch harsh. This is at the end of the day an awesome band and any album that has the first half of Jesus Saves (the latter half is a bit of a more shaky proposition) as well as the barnstorming Agony and Ecstasy and the aforementioned heart rending Believe can't be all bad. It's just that these few moments of clarity aren't enough to make up for the clouded vision that is this album. Two stars for the album and another half a star for having the bollocks to go off on one heck of a tangent from what their fan base had become accustomed to.
"Tonight, She Grins Again"
. . after listening to this album for the umpeenth time. Streets has truly become one of my 'stranded on an island' discs. There isn't a dull song among the bunch and it just gets better every time I listen to it.
I will not bore you by reiterating the albums' story line that everyone else here has posted, but I will say that this is quite possibly one of the most brilliantly written concept albums, ever. Not to mention one of Sav's best. (Dead Winter Dead only comes close). It's an emotional story that I'll bet every one of us, in some way or another can actually relate to. It speaks to the human existence on so many levels.
Structurally speaking, the music is a symbiosis of hard rock/thrash backed with a well-orchestrated sypmphony of brass instruments and well-arranged piano solos, played by none other than the great Jon Oliva. Criss plays some amazing albeit haunting guitar solos here as well. All in all, the arrangements make for one quite emotional experience, indeed. To give you a better idea, albums such as this and Dead Winter Dead are what set the stage for what will eventually become TSO. (Although, Oliva denounces having any part of that). . . Obviously the inspiration was there, however.
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. You can see a complete list of all Savatage discography, or go back to the Savatage tabs
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