Dario Mollo/Tony Martin - The Third Cage

I’m a big fan of Tony’s work with Black Sabbath at the end of the 80s-early 90s. Iommi and Tony formed a very good duo back then and delivered some very strong metal albums like: “The Eternal Idol”, “Headless Cross” and “TYR”. Since then, Tony has sung in various music projects such as: the Tony Martin Band, M3, The Alliance, Misha Calvin, The Cage, Giuntini Project II, Phenomena etc. His two previous albums with Dario (Voodoo Hill, Elektric Zoo, etc) were actually good, so I was eager to listen to the third album by the guys.

 

Unfortunately, “The Third Cage”, does not live up to my expectations… for it may have a great production and some nice performances by the band… but it lacks on the songwriting part. I wasn’t so satisfied when I saw the video of “Wicked World”… and having in mind that a band or a label choose the best song of the album to promote first … I wasn’t quite sure what to think of… so I waited patiently to listen to the whole work.

 

There’s a musical variety on the album… from heavy metal tunes up to more melodic rock/AOR ones… but that doesn’t mean that the result is as good as it was expected to be. The songs that stand out better are those which are closer to the Blackmore/Iommi logic/songwriting (“Oh My Soul”, “Still In Love” (lame lyrics) & “Wardance”)… but then again, Dario may well be a good guitarist but he is not even close to those legendary songwriters/guitarists. Then again, some cheesy songs like: “One Of The Few”, “Can’t Stay Here” and “Don’t Know What It Is About You”… mess things up seriously. Perhaps, the best song here is “Violent Moon”.

 

I tried really hard… and I wanted to like this album… but regrettably, it does not have what it takes so as to be a good hard rock album… neither does it contain songs that will make you play it more than a couple of times again in the future.