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 got to the title "Loving You Is a Dirty Job" first. 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. [
Braver Than We Are was also released on LP.] ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine