Light On Dark Water

Weekend Music

This is for Fr. Matt Venuti, in compensation for my having failed to deliver the post on H.P. Lovecraft that I told him to expect last weekend and still haven't finished. I suspect not many people who read this blog regularly will care for this music, and I can't defend it musically from any sort of broad perspective. But I have a taste for what I call flash guitar–spectacularly fast and intense electric guitar, referred to in the trade as "shredding"–and it doesn't get much flasher than this. It's from an album I'd forgotten I owned, purchased ten years or so ago from eMusic when eMusic was practically free. I've been going through the backup disks I made then of music that I didn't really listen to at the time. I'm slightly embarrassed to name the album: it's from the heavy metal label Metal Blade and is called The Guitars That Rule the World. Yngwie Malmsteen was a young prodigy in the early '80s, and is now an institution.

Say what you will, that's quite a technical feat. Appropriately, the first sentence of the first review of the album on Amazon is "This album rules." But isn't that supposed to be "rulz"?

Actually, my favorite track on the album is the much less flashy but way more soulful "Blues for Stevie" by Albert Collins.