As ever, the revolving door of musicians gives yet another line-up. This time he’s got ex-Rainbow singer Doogie White, former Dream Theater man Derek Sherinian on keys, and Yngwie stalwart Patrick Johansson on drums.
Musically, it’s much what we expect from a Yngwie album; a lot of blindingly-fast scales and arpeggios, and songs with violent imagery. Sadly, most of the songs are fairly ordinary, with the standouts being the two of the instrumentals, “Majestic Blue” and “Air”. Derek Sherinian’s talents are largely wasted, since the keys are mostly inaudible. On one song, Yngwie proves to the world he can’t sing when he takes the vocals of “Freedom isn’t Free”.
Lyrics are either mindless macho crap or gloriously dumb, depending on your opinion. For example, in “Valhalla”, we get this Spinal tap-esqu gem:
We come from the north
We come from the ice
We live dangerously
And very short lives
We fight day by day
Sailing the seas
Makes his earlier “I am a Viking” look like a classic.
Overall, this is neither better nor worse than any of his previous umpteen albums. Yngwie has been a parody of himself for years. Although he’s got an undoubted instrumental talent, he’s never been more than a mediocre songwriter and a truly terrible lyricist. He really ought to team up with a singer that writes, but sadly his gigantic ego prevents him from collaborating with anyone else with some compositional talent, I’d love to hear him do an album with Dio, for instance, but I can’t see it ever happening.
I’ll rate this one as a mere two (out of five)
Yngwie Malmsteen, is the biggest fucking asshole ever. I cant put up with that fucking dick anymore. He is an amazing guitar player, but he is also an asshole, who criticizes wrong people for wrong reasons, by saying things like “who cares abotu them?” or “they dont matter”. Thats probably why no one can be in a band with that selfish fuck.
He is an idiot.
I recently read a review, where he criticised everyone and anyone about their playing.
This inculded Jeff Beck – “out of tune” during “‘Cos We’ve Ended As Lovers”. Excuse me, but crying isn’t necessarily in tune.
Yngwie – you got what you deserved.
the album cover looks like a 70′s hammer house of horror type creation.
didnt he do a good album with joe lynn turner, but then sacked becasue he realised that jlt was talented and had an opinion? oddysey was it?
Oddysey? Yes, that was the one. The fact that it was his best album probably wasn’t a coincidence….
Malmsteen is THE most overrated guitar player, it’s like, all these musically illiterate idiots who don’t know anything about classical music, hear that asshole doing some stupid easy shit (yes, what he does is EASY, ask any good jazz players, it’s a stupid scale in 1 key). However, I still had a tiny bit of respect left for him for the album ‘Marching out’, but as soon as I have read an ASTONISHING book called ‘As above, so below: the unhauthorized Malmsteen biography’, I concluded that Malmsteen is the saddest fucking loser to ever make it to Hollywood. The guy is truly pathetic, if you think you knew about Malmsteen, you need to read that book, seriously. I could not put the damn thing down