The much-maligned Conquest gets two representatives, while Ken Hensley's swan song appears in a pair of live tracks from 1980, including a powerful version of "Suicidal Man." Like Firefly before it, Abominog found Uriah Heep recharged and ready to rock, evidenced on "That's the Way That It Is" and "Think It Over" (a live version of "Too Scared to Run" drawn from Live in Moscow confirms that). The Lawton era balances between ballads ("Free Me," "Come Back to Me") and scorching rockers ("Free 'n' Easy"), plus three great cuts from Firefly, hiding the precipitous decline in product that transpired from Firefly to Fallen Angel (the lone track from Live in Europe 1979 is beyond salvaging, however). The Best of.Part 2 minimizes that problem by drawing the best tracks from those albums, some of which ( Firefly, Abominog) are enjoyable in their entirety, and others ( Raging Silence, Fallen Angel) which have more valleys than peaks. ( Equator is skipped over because of a licensing issue.) It's no secret that Uriah Heep's albums after David Byron's departure were uneven, a problem exacerbated by frequent lineup changes (including four vocalists: John Lawton, John Sloman, Peter Goalby, and Bernie Shaw). The Best of.Part 2 chronicles the band's post-Byronic efforts, sampling everything from Firefly to Different World, with a pair of unreleased live tracks from 1980 thrown in for good measure. and reissued in an expanded, remastered version in the mid-'90s. This is a companion compilation to The Best of.Part 1, which was originally released in 1975 as simply The Best Of.
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