Review: Blue Lightning by Yngwie Malmsteen

Yngwie Malmsteen plays the Blues… sort of

I’d like to first start off by saying Yngwie Malmsteen is and will always be a guitar god. As the father of neoclassical metal, I have immense respect for Malmsteen’s technical prowess, compositional skills, and ability to shred with such ferocity that your eyeballs could melt. That being said, if Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads so he could be a blues master, then Yngwie sold his soul off Craigslist to a classic rock station in Tampa. 

   

The album is weird. I read an interview where Malmsteen talked about Blue Lightning and he said: 

“I've been asked to do a blues album for the last 30 years. And this time I finally said, 'Sure, why not? Let's try it!' I just didn't want to be stuck in the standard, pentatonic, play a 12-bar thing. I didn't want to do that.”. 

While the quote sounds good on paper, the combination of neoclassical arpeggios and shreds on top of legendary blues rock songs is odd. At best. The entire album is made up of a few originals, but it is mostly a cover album. He covers two Jimi Hendrix songs (Foxey Lady and Purple Haze), Paint it Black by the Rolling Stones, Demon’s Eye and Smoke on the Water by Deep Purple, and even a ZZ Top song (Blue Jean Blues). The cover I am most disappointed by is While My Guitar Gently Weeps, one of my favorite Beatles’ songs and favorite solos by Eric Clapton (who collaborated with the Beatles on this song). 

   

Gently Weeps is considered one of the greatest guitar songs of all time, in large part thanks to the magnificent soloing and riffing done by George Harrison and Eric Clapton. The song not only sounds melancholic, it feels sad. So much so that the guitar truly does sound like it is wailing in agony. The emotion reflected in the masterpiece is why I am so disappointed in Blue Lightning. Malmsteen simply doesn’t sound sad. 

The Blues gets its most signature sound and feeling from the emotions put out by the player. If you listen and watch the great masters of blues and rock guitar such as Robert Johnson, B.B. King, and Jimi Hendrix, you can see how big an impact their emotions have on their playing. Listening to Malmsteen play feels like he is just jamming and playing along to the tune, but not actually feeling it. It feels soulless and falls flat. All the arpeggios and sweeps in the world can’t save the album from what it is, a very talented musician showing off how talented he is. 

    Malmsteen’s album gets 1.5 blue lightning bolts 

https://www.loudersound.com/features/yngwie-malmsteens-track-by-track-guide-to-new-album-blue-lightning

Review: Berserker by Amon Amarth

“We stare at death with crimson grins, with Odin's help we cannot fail”

Amon Amarth, the Viking Death Metal legends hailing from Sweden, will have fans and critics smiling after they listen to their latest album, Berserker. Songs filled with blistering guitars lead us into the fray of an epic battle, accompanied by the usual chugs and brutality that we have come to expect and love from Amon Amarth. Johan Hegg's growls are as crisp and strong as ever before- not something that can be said for most death metal vocalists after almost 30 years.

Moonsorrow - Jumalten Aika

Moonsorrow, that band that gives my music library classification scheme a massive headache by trying to figure out what the hell genre they really are, has a new album! After a 5 year gap since Varjoina kuljemme kuolleiden maassa (which is nearly as long as it took me to write this post, thanks grad school), we get Jumalten aika. As one comes to expect with Moonsorrow, you have a 66 minute album consisting of 5 tracks, and it's generally best to listen to the album as a whole experience rather than isolating individual tracks. At least, that's my own experience with this Finnish quintet.

Jumalten aika represents a step back in a much folkier direction for Moonsorrow. While Varjoina kuljemme kuolleiden maassa was a great album in its own right, it featured a much more stripped down sound than its successor. Jumalten aika is about as strangely opposite of that as you can get, with pretty much constant backing from (going off the Metal Archives lineup credits) keyboards, an accordian, a jaw harp, a recorder, and a tin whistle. Then throw in a backing choir for good measure.

Steignyr - The Prophecy of the Highlands

Surely it's no secret (courtesy of my personal Top 10 Metal Albums post) that I love me some cheesy folk metal. So imagine my joy when I saw a band described as "Celtic Folk Metal" in this week's New Releases thread on /r/metal. So I went to YouTube, and clicked on the first Steignyr song that came up (Tales of a Forgotten Hero, apparently the title track of their second album). Upon realizing that I own better medieval-y garb than anyone in this band, I decided I had to give their newest release a shot. This is also my first encounter with Steignyr, so this will even be the first album I review with no prior conceptions about the band.

The best way I've come up with to describe Steignyr is that they sound like a less folky Eluveitie with a deeper vocalist. Granted, saying a band is less folky than Eluveitie is like saying a person is less wet when they're not in a swimming pool, because, for crying out loud, Eluveitie has a full-time hurdy-gurdy.

Fleshgod Apocalypse Still 'King's of Technical Death Metal

Fleshgod Apocalypse's fourth full-length album, King, takes them yet another step closer to achieving the level of balance I've been hoping for out of this band since Agony.

All of the basics are still there, with most tracks being driven by the same unrelenting double bass, as if the drummer just needs to prove to the world that he doesn't skip leg day. Guitar work is just as intricate as ever and requires multiple listens to really appreciate fully. And, as often happens on albums in this general genre, the bassist is mostly just left to play with himself in a corner.

But that's par for the course for technical death metal these days. What really sets Fleshgod Apocalypse apart from the rest of the crowd is their use of backing strings and keyboard, which have (at least so far) reached their peak on this album. They add just enough to each song to make an otherwise good to great tech death track into a properly epic one. Best examples of such on this album are probably "In Aeternum" and "Healing Through War."