Ελληνικά
Noble Savage is the third studio album of Virgin Steele, released in 1985 by Cobra Records. And no matter which is your favorite album from the New York’s great Heavy Metal band you have to admit that when we talk about Noble Savage we are dealing with probably with their most important record in their career. Not only because they managed to survive after the departure of one of the coolest song writers and guitarists out there, Jack Starr but mostly why they introduced us the symphonic side of their sound, containing grandiose compositions with multi-layered keyboard sound and more sophisticated arrangements. As I mentioned before just before the recording of Noble Savage, things weren’t easy for Virgin Steele as when big egos collide it is determine to crush. And David with Jack had a big fight before David become let’s say a dictator (I say it in a good way though) and their original guitarist Jack Starr resigned from the band. Even though it was impossible to fit on Starr’s shoes still his replacer Edward Pursino, which was an old friend of DeFeis, his skills and fresh playing actually fit perfectly with the songs and the style of the band. Furthermore Pursino brought some new ideas (and riffs) and compositions that Defeis was brave to use immediately and proved wise as Pursino is still a mainstay in Virgin Steele’s line-up. Starr was focused on leads and soloing than being a riff machine. Last but not least the rhythm section is solid, with Joey Ayvazian and Joe O’Reilly doing excellent work here.
Noble Savage made Virgin Steele bigger, commercially speaking but also gave them some huge songs hymns of Heavy Metal that they still play on their concerts. The album starts emphatically with We Rule The Night, a perfect anthem that I have a small story about it as it brings me in mind a moment in a romance two friends of mine had and when the first passion years passed they had a sick relationship with many fights, words that should never had exchange, break – ups, finally divorce, drunken nights, and other “love” paraphernalia. Many years later one night I saw them, while they had both moved on, in a bar sitting far from each other and when the DJ played We Rule The Night , they started headbanging. When the song was on the chorus they looked each other through smoke and bad light in the shithole we were having our beers and sung to each other alternatively the verses, when finally sung together “You and I” and when the song finished returned to their company and lives…Epic!
The album has a plethora of directions as Virgin Steele seems a bit confused here between epic (Angel of Light, Noble Savage – which its second instrumental part reminds me the theme of a famous 90’s Greek soap opera entitled Lampsi translated to Shinning ), a ballad (Don’t Close Your Eyes), raw heavy metal (Thy Kingdom Come, Fight Tooth and Nail) and pure rockers (I’m on Fire, Rock Me), but it is the top notch quality that saves the day and creates a multidimensional album, rich of sounds, elements and at the end brilliant!!! C’mon even if the album had only Angel of Light and Noble Savage it would have been enough to make it a classic. Still it has many great songs as Defeis achieved to mix his love for symphonic music, Rainbow, Judas Priest and soundtracks without losing any of the raw power his music reflected balancing perfectly incongruous influences always with an epic aura and grand atmosphere. A triumph!
The album was reissued in 1997 on CD by Noise Records with six bonus tracks. The remastered edition of 2008 by Dockyard 1 added two other extra tracks. In May 2011, the album was reissued once more by Steamhammer Records, a subsidiary of SPV with the same track list as the 1997 release, but with an added bonus CD containing 13 additional tracks.
As for the term Noble Savage internet is rather rich for more information:
In Western anthropology, philosophy, and literature, the noble savage is a stock character who is uncorrupted by civilization. As such, the noble savage symbolizes the innate goodness and moral superiority of a primitive people living in harmony with Nature. In the heroic drama of the stageplay The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards (1672), John Dryden represents the noble savage as an archetype of Man-as-Creature-of-Nature.
The intellectual politics of the Stuart Restoration (1660–1688) expanded Dryden’s playwright usage of savage to denote a human wild beast and a wild man. Concerning civility and incivility, in the Inquiry Concerning Virtue, or Merit (1699), the philosopher Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, said that men and women possess an innate Morality, a sense of right and wrong conduct, which is based upon the intellect and the emotions, and not based upon religious doctrine.
In the philosophic debates of 17th-century Britain, the Inquiry Concerning Virtue, or Merit was the Earl of Shaftesbury’s Ethical response to the political philosophy of Leviathan (1651), in which Thomas Hobbes defended absolute monarchy and justified centralized government as necessary because the condition of Man in the apolitical state of nature is a “war of all against all”, for which reason the lives of men and women are “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” without the political organization of people and resources. The European Hobbes gave as example the American Indians as people living in the bellicose state of nature that precedes tribes and clans organizing into the societies that compose a civilization.
In 18th-century anthropology the term noble savage then denoted nature’s gentleman, an ideal man born from the sentimentalism of moral sense theory. In the 19th century, in the essay “The Noble Savage” (1853) Charles Dickens rendered the noble savage into a rhetorical oxymoron by satirizing the British romanticisation of Primitivism in philosophy and in the arts made possible by moral sentimentalism.
