I felt like listening to this album today. I was in the mood for some progressive metal and some power metal, but not the usual. So I went poking through my collection and remembered Brazil’s Angra.
The BNR Metal Pages say this is Brazil’s best-known band after Sepultura, but nobody asked me. I’ve got more of Angra’s albums than I do Sepultura’s. (No disrespect to the latter intended; I tried listening to Sepultura but it didn’t appeal.)
If I remember right, I had gotten Angels Cry as part of a 1988 two-album set issued by Steamhammer that also included Angra’s 1996 album Holy Land in 2005.
While Angels Cry includes a cover of “Wuthering Heights” by Kate Bush, it isn’t a standout track for me. Though vocalist Andre Matos makes a valiant effort, he can’t quite match Bush’s performance. While there are songs that a man can sing even though the lyrics are originally from a woman’s viewpoint, “Wuthering Heights” is not one of them. It is too deeply rooted in its literary inspiration, the novel by Emily Brontë, for that.
Nor did Angels Cry particularly need a cover song. It has plenty of solid original songs that still hold up over thirty years after their original release, like “Carry On”, “Time”, the title track, “Stand Away”, and “Evil Warning”.
album cover
track listing
- Unfinished Allegro
- Carry On ♥
- Time ♥
- Angels Cry ♥
- Stand Away ♥
- Never Understand
- Wuthering Heights (orig. Kate Bush)
- Streets Of Tomorrow
- Evil Warning ♥
- Lasting Child, Part I: The Parting Words
- Lasting Child, Part II: Renaissance