Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Satriani, Joe
Label: Sony Music
Release: 2010
Length: 53:23
Rating: 4/5
What is there left for the founding father of modern guitar rock on this planet, the one and only Joe Satriani, to say? The new studio album, whose title vaguely echoes Dream Theater’s latest, except they’re singing about black clouds instead of swans, is his thirteenth overall. After all these years we’ve gotten used to the Satriani approach like we’re used to breathing air or visiting the bathroom (any number of times a day). Albums have become something taken for granted, with contents you could pretty much define in advance. The hardcore base of loyal music fanatics, the music-professor types especially, was carved out long ago, and nobody expects any special musical revolution from Joe these days.
And yet, the guitar wizard makes sure his already overstuffed daily routine doesn’t, God forbid, end up unfilled. You’ve probably guessed already: I mean the super rock band Chickenfoot. It’s Joe joining Chickenfoot that, more than anything, had a positive effect on making “Black Swans And Wormhole Wizards” a somewhat different album.
It sounds warm, alive and coherent, like very few of Joe’s albums released since “Flying In A Blue Dream” and/or “The Extremist”. Why? This time Joe gathered musicians around him like Satch’s longtime drummer Jeff Campitelli and bassist Allen Whitman. Both guys are a fixture of the live tours and Satch has them down cold, in the pinky of his left hand. On top of that, Campitelli is Satch’s tried-and-tested studio fixture. Satch did one more important thing: he let his ego hand over the keyboard duties on certain tracks to another musician. It might all seem perfectly ordinary, if that musician didn’t answer to the name Mike Keneally. Keneally is a top-notch player who in his time sat behind towering stacks of keyboards as part of the crews of, among others, Frank Zappa and Zappa’s protégé Steve Vai. This time even a deaf-mute “listener” can tell in a heartbeat that for certain keyboard arrangements even Satriani is too “left-handed”!
The sense of coherence is strong, and it feels like the album was recorded live in the studio with the whole quartet in the room, plugged into the channels of the mixing desk and the same power supply. Even when it comes to stirring up emotions through the sermon of Satriani’s guitar language, this time we can stand our ground more easily, more weightily and more firmly, and haggle over arguments that are fully justified, laid down by Satriani’s current expressionism in the freshly created arrangements.
Sonically, Satriani’s guitar this time is woven into the skeleton of the instrumental backing in a way that gives no sense of pretentiousness, no need to sit dead center of the expression, no grabbing for attention. Sure, the phrases and solo escapades still carry the weight of the guitar sermon – that’s how it has to be, otherwise Satriani’s whole charm would go down the drain – but this time there’s a much stronger sense of the individual building blocks pulling together. Just the nicely upfront, warm hum of the bass, with Satriani’s guitar noodling slyly wrapped in its sonic collage, makes the two instruments chat away in a lively, dynamic, animated fashion, like two market ladies who have known each other far too well their whole lives.
Satriani has also come up with a few striking detours in arranging the new material, which is a lovely surprise. The sleepy blues waltz Littleworth Lane is one of them. Even though Satriani isn’t a blues guitarist and is still “too good” (too precise) for the song in this role, it’s the seasoned Keneally with his Hammond sound who saves the situation, and the track comes off as a thoroughly successful trick. Right after it, Satriani’s newly found free-spiritedness surprises with The Golden Room, where the “Satriani rock” sound tangles with Hindu melos in an atmospherically outstanding, spellbinding way. Of course, the key is once again the sparkling Keneally joining the album! The track is full of unexpected twists, created by Satriani’s heavenly soloing, the natural sound of the percussion arrangements, and a massive cloak of guitar riffs and a curtain of keyboards. An unexpected detour for Satriani, which is a given in the case of his colleague Vai, but for Joe it’s extremely welcome, since it actually works most convincingly on the album, and at the same time lets Satriani credibly open up new creative fields for the future. You barely catch your breath and here comes Two Sides To Every Story, where Satriani heads strictly into jazz waters and makes extra use of Keneally’s manual skills, the kind that the late Joe Zawinul (Weather Report) would have envied in a heartbeat. The intense flow of events is eased for a moment by the lighter, ear-invading Wormhole Wizards, and then Satriani sets off once again into the realm of dreams and (I’m not lying!) psychedelic-cerebral eroticism in Wind In The Trees. It’s in this track especially that you feel the exceptional coherence between the instruments, achieved this time in the production, while most of the atmosphere is once again created by Keneally’s keyboards. Another absolute detour that Satriani badly needed to air things out and, to a fair degree, negate his almost proverbial studio predictability. This is the high point of a nicely spontaneous feel and an atmosphere that builds gradually, loop after loop of the individual phrases. So Satriani has added an element of unpredictability to the album, which is not exactly an everyday move for him.
Of course, there are a few tracks that are typical “Satriani stuff” from head to toe. You can’t do without them, and that’s fine. They have to be there. The opener Premonition, with its mildly mischievous accent, doesn’t hide Satriani’s good-natured character and sense of goofy humor. The album’s last track, God Is Crying, gives off a similar vibe, only in a more serious and even somewhat solemn way, and it wraps up this richly expressive and varied album excellently. Dream Song is a classic Satriani guitar rock ballad that tastefully strings together new moods and gratefully balances out the initial onslaught of Premonition. Pyrrhic Victoria also belongs to this class of typical “Satchafunkilus” charisma, though it’s enriched and spiced up by Keneally’s witty arrangements. Then there’s the wound-up Light Years Away, whose lead guitar phrase, in a kind of subcutaneous way, comes closest to the rock edginess of what Satriani does with Chickenfoot.
You could say Satriani’s sermon has gained a new dimension with the new album. Not in the sense of some revolutionary creative leap, but in the sense that Satriani, thanks above all to his work with Chickenfoot, has rediscovered the magic word “band”, and so the new album is in production terms actually the strongest, though not the most expressively convincing, in the series of recent studio releases from this seasoned musical virtuoso, pioneer and visionary. Because the new album carries a dose of unpredictability and bold experimentation, occasionally handing the lead role to the keyboards too, it’s an album that will need more time to sink in under your skin. And that very realization only confirms the newfound juiciness and freshness with which Satriani moves through his expression on this album, and in which the musician evidently feels more than great. Let’s hope that in the future the touch of the magic word will deepen and broaden his experimenting with his own musical vocabulary even further. “Black Swans And Wormhole Wizards” has richly rewarded him for it.
Lineup
Joe Satriani – guitar, bass guitar, keyboards
Allen Whitman – bass guitar
Mike Keneally – keyboards
Jeff Campitelli – drums, percussion
Production
Mike Fraser & Joe Satriani
Tracklist
1. Premonition (3:53)
2. Dream Song (4:49)
3. Pyrrhic Victoria (5:09)
4. Light Years Away (6:11)
5. Solitude (0:58)
6. Littleworth Lane (3:46)
7. The Golden Room (5:20)
8. Two Sides to Every Story (4:10)
9. Wormhole Wizards (6:27)
10. Wind in the Trees (7:43)
11. God is Crying (4:53)
