For most people, the arrival of a new year often means a time of change, of looking forward; a time to embrace new ideas and new projects. This is especially true for Damo Fawsett, a hard-working guitarist who recently parted ways with his band Slam Cartel. He already has various new projects underway. At the beginning of January 2016, he stopped by at Real Gone to tell us all about them…
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When it comes to hard rock and metal guitar playing. there’s a fine line between melodic, harmonious workouts and empty, soulless fretboard bashing for the sake of it. For every player who understands the importance of filling several bars with succinct and thoughtful soloing, there are a thousand John Petrucci wannabes who think – oft like Dream Theater themselves – that notes and flash are a thousand times more impressive than actual tunes…and just because we can see them pulling orgasm faces while bending strings at lightning speeds, we’ll somehow feel the magic too. They’re wrong, of course.
For fans of shred-metal, Chris Impellitteri is a man who needs no introduction. With his eponymously named outfit, the Californian fretboard melter has been issuing discs filled with bombastic Euro-inflected metal for years, often with either ex-Joshua mouthpiece Rob Rock or ex-Rainbow man Graham Bonnet on vocals. Heavy and fast are Impellitteri’s two favourite styles – usually demonstrated together – and 2015’s ‘Venom’ (the band’s tenth album, breaking a six year silence) follows that expected pattern.
In 2011, Devin Townsend released his fourth “project” album, ‘Ghost’. A record heard by millions, it combined ambient-ish qualities with a mellow style that showed off a very relaxed side of the man who once gave us skull-crushing metal as frontman with Strapping Young Lad. Around the same time that those millions were getting (rightly) excited about Devin’s ‘Ghost’, somewhere in Northern Ireland, guitarist Andrew Danso had not long finished work on ‘f i n d’, a collection of largely instrumental soundscapes which appeared to share more than a few traits with Townsend’s record, but approached atmospheric music with an even spacier slant. The album, unsurprisingly, slipped under the radar of most of the people who really should’ve heard it, as is the plight of many an independent musician.
February 2015 sees the release of ‘Now Your Ships Are Burned’, a four CD anthology of work recorded by Swedish guitarist Yngwie Malmsteen. The set covers his years with Polydor Records from 1984-1990.
The set will be a domestic budget priced reissue of the previously Japanese only collection which included the first six albums. Like similar sets from Saxon (‘The Carrere Years’) and Tangerine Dream (‘The Virgin Years’), the length of the albums is such that six releases can easily be condensed into a 4CD package.