As befits an album that has such a mix of brilliance and weirdness, the final song, seemingly intended as a magnum opus closing statement to the album, is a ten-minute-plus epic that has a few great parts and a few that aren’t that feel Frankensteined together.

Opening with pretty close to a literal bang, “The Future Ain’t What It Used to Be” starts off with a booming sound that seems to me like a synthesized gong with a blast of synth horns. A choir shouts “No!” over some odd shaking bell sounding rhythms as a piano starts playing the title melody, joined by very gentle “ooh” background vocals. A glass-breaking sound heralds the arrival of Gina Taylor’s lead vocals.

Accompanied by the shaking bell rhythms, a piano, and soft background vocals, Taylor delivers a big, melodramatic reading of the first verse and the chorus. There are some twangy sliding guitar leads here as well, but there aren’t too many. At the end of the chorus, we get a louder, more rhythmic piano line as she wails above it, the catchiest part of the song to this point. We go through it all again with everything just getting a bit louder and, at the point when most songs would be ending, things just get going with an instrumental rhythm/piano/backing vocal passage that’s a variation on “Surf’s Up” from Bad for Good and reappears with minor changes in one of his greatest songs a few years after this.

Everything softens for another trip through the chorus with soft rhythms, piano, and Taylor’s lead vocals on top of layers of backing vocals and synthesizer chords. It fades out very slowly and a couple of piano arpeggios signal the end of the song proper. And then we get something of a barber shop version of the chorus repeating to fade out for another couple of minutes, which interestingly actually makes the chorus catchier than in its previous incarnations.

I hate the twanging guitars in the verses and they are part of what leads to a feeling that the verses and the chorus are rather disconnected. The repeated instrumental passage that’s catchier than any of the lyrical bits also feels rather like it belongs somewhere else. I also feel like the hook of the chorus really works with everything around it, which is why it doesn’t really connect until it’s laid bare in the barbershop ending, when it actually sounds great.

Compared to many Steinman songs, the lyrics are pretty straightforward. It opens with “I never knew so many bad times/Could follow me so mercilessly/It’s almost surreal/All the pain that I feel/The future ain’t what it used to be” and really just keeps on that message. One thing that’s interesting is that, for what is essentially a depression song, it’s focused on the future, not the present. She says that she’s in a bad place and mentions the many suffering people (“the falling angels,” those caught in “the rising waters,” “the broken hearted,” and of course “your sons and daughters”) in the same situation but doesn’t even wish for the current situation to improve. Instead, she’s just looking for hope on the bleak horizon. She concludes, “The future just ain’t what it used to be/I wish it wouldn’t come/But it always does.”

Taylor’s vocal here is noteworthy even compared to most Steinman songs for how hard she is selling the emotion–she is barely even touching on the melody in many places, shouting and wailing away in her own emotional space. The power and melodrama in her voice is so reminiscent of Meat Loaf here that it’s difficult not to draw the comparison, and she really stands up to it. She has a wider range and really never gets the strained moments that Meat Loaf sometimes has. It’s a great performance.

So, we close out Original Sin and, as it turns out, Pandora’s Box with an epic that has its good points but doesn’t quite work or live up to some of the great moments before it. It’s a bit of a frustrating song, since the “Surf’s Up” portion and the barbershop part definitely show the bones of something great, but it just doesn’t really work, even though Gina Taylor is absolutely giving everything she has to trying to make it work.

Original Sin is a great album, even if it’s a bit messy. It doesn’t live up to the two Bat out of Hell albums because of the messiness, but its best points are every bit as good as anything he would do with Meat Loaf. Most of the original songs on this album–“Original Sin (The Natives Are Restless Tonight),” “Good Girls Go to Heaven (Bad Girls Go Everywhere),” “It’s All Coming back to Me Now,” and “It Just Won’t Quit”–would end up resurfacing in more famously elsewhere, including covers of all five by Meat Loaf. Even the speeches are really well-done, though none of them would catch on the way “Hot Summer Night” did on Bat out of Hell. The classical bits, the re-hashing of “The Storm” as “The Opening of the Box,” and the two covers are all pretty forgettable and almost come across as filler in an era when seven-song albums were a bit passé, but at least Steinman isn’t just trying to recreate Bat out of Hell again the way both Bad for Good and Dead Ringer did.

Sometime late in 1989 or 1990, Meat Loaf and Steinman decided to work together again. Meat Loaf had maintained a following in Europe early in the ’80s but his 1986 Blind before I Stop album was a disappointment even there, leaving him seemingly commercially finished. He had recovered his voice and was still something of a concert attraction, but it definitely did not seem likely that any albums were going to sell because of his name again, especially in an American marketplace that had no interest in him after Bat out of Hell. Neither was exactly at a high commercial level at this point, so there is some logic to trying again at this point.