Meat Loaf – Braver Than (LP)(Ex) For Cheap

Jim Steinman parted ways with Meat Loaf sometime after their improbable 1993 blockbuster Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell. He contributed a couple of songs to its 1995 sequel, Welcome to the Neighborhood, but by the time Meat Loaf was ready to do a third installment of Bat Out of Hell, Steinman opted out for unspecified reasons, leaving the singer to use five previously released Steinman songs as produced by Desmond Child — a satisfactory compromise that at the very least illustrated how Celine Dion s It s All Coming Back to Me Now should ve been on a Bat Out of Hell album. Through a series of circumstances, Meat Loaf and Steinman wound up reuniting for 2016 s Braver Than We Are, which was produced by Paul Crook, just like its 2012 predecessor Hell in a Handbasket. While the record bears some slick modern hallmarks, it is very much a throwback, evoking memories of Todd Rundgren s overblown Springsteen parody of 1977 as well as the earnest re-creation of 1993. Steinman s songs are suitably theatrical — the opening Who Needs the Young feels like it s a Broadway reject — and while he slyly winks at his past with Going All the Way Is Just the Start (A Song in 6 Movements), a song that features a cameo from Paradise by the Dashboard Light singer Ellen Foley, he also seems unaware that Ratt also got to the title Loving You Is a Dirty Job in 1990 (albiet after Steinman whose composition first appeared as a Bonnie Tyler single in 1985). That isolation is ultimately a benefit because Braver Than We Are feels caught between nostalgia and indifference, an album so old-fashioned it seems happily ignorant of modernity even when it threads EDM rhythms and metallic guitars into More. The other way it s possible to tell this album was released in 2016 is Meat Loaf s performance. Thin and sometimes breathless, he s no longer the colossus of the 70s, but the diminishment of his range humanizes him and adds a bittersweet tinge to this reunion. Through Meat Loaf s voice alone, mortality becomes evident and it makes this third reunion with Steinman all the sweeter. Braver Than We Are may have its flaws — it s too staid and self-conscious, for one — but Steinman never found a better interpreter for his songs than Meat Loaf, and Meat Loaf never sounds more like himself than he does when singing Steinman, and that s why the album works. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine

• Format: Vinyl
• Genre: Pop
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