I'd agree with you up to a point. I think every metal head has "Holy diver" in their collection, and it is one of the seminal metal albums of that period. I don't think I know anyone, who's into metal, who has a bad word to say about it. Personally, I think it and "The last in line" form the apex of Dio's achievements, and from there on he began to slide into not quite mediocrity, but a far lower level of quality. Maybe it was the brilliance of those two albums that did for him: people expected the third one to be as good (I know I did) and it wasn't, then the fourth was, let's be honest, pretty average and after that, up until I think "Killing the dragon", he released a fairly okay but nothing special slew of albums that totally failed to capitalise on the success of "Holy diver" and "The last in line".
I guess you could pull tracks from most of the albums and make up one decent one (excepting HD and TLIL), but that's not really good enough, is it? After releasing, what, ten albums, there should have been at least a glimmer of the spark that fired the debut, but by and large there wasn't. I really consider his later solo career a missed opportunity, and the disappointment of the third and fourth albums led to my stopping buying any new material from him, something I only started doing again a year or so ago. I didn't feel I'd missed much.
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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018
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