El Barto is spot-fucking on here. It was ballsy (and not really in a good way) for Dio to come right out the gate with "Rainbow In The Dark", and while he played it, it was way heavier live and Claude Schnell spent the first two tours playing keys from behind a curtain on the back of the stage. I probably have 10 albums from that era that have "No Keyboards!" in the liner notes.
Maiden (and Priest) both used them on one album, and both noticeably came back with WAY heavier albums.
Well...Maiden used guitar and bass synthesizers on
Somewhere in Time and on SSOASS. That they also used an actual keyboard as the input interface on the latter seems to be a distinction without a difference. Same with Priest on
Turbo and
Ram It Down, and in Priest's case,
Turbo was the far more keyboard-y sounding album. In my view -- and I think this is general consensus --
Ram It Down was far superior to
Turbo, although I agree that it had a handful of clunkers. Similarly, while SSOASS had lots of clunkers,
No Prayer for the Dying was the weakest of the Dianno/Dicknoson I era albums by a country mile (even though it might have been heavier than SSOASS).
As far as the original topic of the thread:
Styx -
Kilroy Was Here: This is more of a retrospective opinion. At the time, I liked it well enough, but I didn't know enough at the time to truly understand how disappointing it was. Looking back, it's easy to see it as the album that killed what was, at that time, my favorite band.
Rush -
Roll the Bones: Such a massive disappointment after the bounceback album that was
Presto.
Dream Theater -
Falling into Infinity: I've written volumes in other threads.
Dream Theater -
Systematic Chaos: After SFAM, 6DOIT, TOT and 8VA, it felt like DT could do no wrong. This album proved that hypothesis to be wrong.
Judas Priest -
Turbo: It's the only Priest album I didn't replace on CD when I trashed my vinyl records.
Fates Warning -
Disconnected: This is a little unfair given that it followed up a masterpiece, but it never grabbed me, although it has a couple good songs. Although I liked
FWX even less, I think
Disconnected is more disappointing just because it was such a letdown after APSOG.