Uriah Heep - Forever (1997)

As a preteen, I used to mostly listen to hard rock and heavy metal. This was what was fashionable in Finland at the time. Especially for boys, bands like Metallica, Guns n' Roses and Nirvana, were the coolest bands out there. At some point me and my friends started discovering the roots of this music genre we were so much into, and discovered bands like Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and Black Sabbath. I also realised at this point that these were the bands my father had listened to as a young adult. He had some of these albums on vinyl as well, which was really cool and it sparked my interest in vinyl. Uriah Heep definitely wasn't as well known band as the ones I mentioned above, but I liked their music immediately. It was more melodic than most of the other bands in that genre and I've always been something of a fool for melodies.

My father had even seen Uriah Heep in early 70s at a music festival in Finland and got their autographs on a piece of paper. The album he had from Uriah Heep was Demons and Wizards. I soon discovered that Uriah Heep had lots of other great albums as well. Salisbury soon became my favourite from them. As was the custom at the time, it was easiest to start with a compilation album, because I certainly couldn't just buy all of the albums at once and with compilation album, you could get quite a few of the best songs in one go. The problem that I've found out about this approach later on is that the compilations do not really always include the best songs and also, they're not really as good albums since the songs are from different periods of the band and they don't necessarily match each other on a single album. With this particular compilation, I really liked the first CD with the older material, but I didn't much care for the second CD that was closer to the 80s style of playing hard rock, which I wasn't much of a fan of.

The other problem with the compilation was that it includes the songs as single versions, which are normally much shorter than the original album versions. Sometimes this doesn't matter as much, but since we're talking about a progressive rock band, some of the songs really suffer from the shorter length. The best example of this is the song Salisbury. The original song is glorious 16 minutes long and it includes some of the best guitar solos I've ever heard. On this compilation, this song has been reduced to few minutes and all the best parts have been omitted. Now, writing this blogpost, I found out that this compilation was only made for the Finnish market and it wasn't released anywhere else. This means that I had to create the playlist in Spotify for this myself and I decided to include the full songs, because even if they're not on this compilation, they are much superior and if anyone's going to listen to this compilation inspired by my writing, I want them to experience the full experience of Uriah Heep, and particularly the song Salisbury, which I think is one of the greatest songs of its time.

I really like watching old live videos of rock bands playing in the 70s. The hair styles, the clothes and everything look so fantastically strange from today's perspective. Here is a music video for Easy Living. The dance moves in the crowds and the moustaches are just phenomenal. 

Uriah Heep has also become something of a joke for me and my friends in later years. The lead singer David Byron has an incredibly high singing voice in some of the songs. I didn't really think that much of it back in the day when I started listening to the band. I just thought it was really cool how high he can get. But now, I can see the humoristic point about this style of singing. Where it's most apparent, is in the song Bird of Prey, where his vocals touch the sky with quite ludicrous style.

I don't really listen to Uriah Heep much anymore. It's a thing of my teenage years. The time when I was learning to play the guitar and bass and was looking up to these people who mastered their instruments so perfectly that they could play those solos that I knew by heart. Now, some of these sound a bit pretentious to me, but then again, being excited about them helped me in getting excited about playing instruments. I still do really like some of the songs on this album that are not too over the top and I still do think songs like Salisbury are absolute masterpieces.

Listen to the album on Spotify.