Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Vai, Steve
Label: Favored Nations
Release: 2012
Duration: 58:47
Rating: 4/5
Steve Vai, the fastest guitar hero in the galaxy, the most “out-there” hero of instrumental rock, of guitar rock. He remains one of a handful of the world’s most extravagant artists in the business, a true oddball! Plain and simple. He’s an unpredictable musical character, and you never know exactly »what he’ll pull out of his hat« on the road of his artistic expression.
New studio albums don’t exactly come easily to the guy, judging by the number of his »recent« releases in the 21st century. A full seven years have passed since the last one. Then again, Steve Vai doesn’t really feel any lack, and he’s clearly in no rush. He’s spiced up the gap between albums with a few compilation and live releases for his fans and music gourmets, and business keeps booming more than nicely with the G3 project too, which he runs with his former guitar teacher, Joe Satriani.
»The guitar spider,« who will be dropping by Ljubljana in November for the fourth time in his career as part of the new album’s promo run, has put out another record with »The Story Of Light« that’s convincing in how it serves up creative energy, inspiration and insight, especially when you set it next to the somewhat limp and all-too-predictable »The Real Illusions: Reflections« (2005). After that album it looked like Vai had said what he had to say. Some of the bounce and the overall expressive variety also got sapped by Steve Vai’s excessive reliance on vocals, courtesy of Steve Vai himself. He’s not as unconvincing a singer as his colleague Satriani, but still. A little vocals, say a thimbleful, and it still works, but when an album is half instrumentals and half vocal tracks, a problem slowly creeps in. Connoisseurs love listening to Steve Vai first and foremost for the guitar tricks and the one-of-a-kind musical style he’s developed in his instrumental compositions over the course of his career.
»The Story Of Light« is the second part of a concept about the arrival of God’s messenger Pamposh and the creation of a church. Only Steve Vai knows this concept, so it wouldn’t be handy for me to dive into it. Interestingly, Vai doesn’t use keyboards this time, and solves everything with the guitar. All those miraculous sounds are once again boosted by his »floating vibrato,« which remains his trademark, the trademark of his musical vocabulary. It feels good to realize that Steve Vai keeps evolving and is maturing nimbly as an arranger.
The album is properly weighted with more demanding compositions as well as the ones that slide into the ear more easily. One of the more intricately structured tracks is Weeping China Doll, a tough composition, built for long-term consumption, driven by a mix of sinusoidal, shrill guitar training for the master’s solo escapades, laid over a massive riff sound of unusually tuned yet still symphonic melodies, which gives a clear answer that Steve Vai is, in his crossing of motif structures, an absolute Frank Zappa disciple. In the arrangements you can also instantly spot Vai’s meeting of musical minds with another offbeat artist, the Canadian Devin Townsend, an artist Steve Vai himself brought into the spotlight for the masses in 1993 with the album »Sex And Religion«.
But like I said! This album is superbly balanced. After the experimental Weeping China Doll comes the easygoing Racing the World, which completely defuses the electrified atmosphere and, in its figurations, moves closer to the easier-to-solve combinatorics of lead melodies and the rhetoric of guitar improvisation itself, so the feel here is closer to the expression of colleague Satriani (in this respect Gravitiy Storm and the symphonically well-supported, grandly redeemed closer Sunshine Electric Raindrops are also close to it on the album).
The album’s opening is similar. The title track that opens it, into which Steve Vai engraved the enticing speech of a girl (in Russian), a tried-and-tested Vai trick from past works, and Velorum right after it, both brim with the freshness of creative inspiration and the liveliness of the captured sound. At the same time, they instantly reveal that Vai’s typical melos of surprises, from the master’s six-string theory, which picks a melody among melodies and sounds original yet at once »weird,« and so is fully tempting for every gourmet, has by no means rusted..
The third and fourth tracks, though, are the moments of the album’s biggest experiment this time. Also the part of the album that is hardest to digest and demands the most patience from the listener, in fact the most durability from the grey matter of the brain’s cortex to process. Vai decided to play his own version of the American folk song John The Revelator. To be exact, the song was first recorded by Blind Willie Johnson, a man who in other times decisively helped the blossoming and popularization of gospel on American soil. Picture a combination of a gospel sermon directed by Steve Vai’s arrangements? A deadly combination, right? Vai even wove some of Blind Willie Johnson’s original vocal lines into his version.
Vai creates real chaos here, and it escalates as both songs develop. Both John The Revelator and Book Of The Seven Seals after it slip into one another unnoticed. Both are criss-crossed with gospel chants and the expressively powerful vocals of singer Beverly McClellan, whose resolute »black« soul voice counterbalances the sharpness of the massively suspended guitar phrases. Here we have the blues as a platform that grimaces and warps under the weight of Vai’s distinctive guitar derivatives.
It’s clear that Vai would do better not to touch the blues, and yet this is more than an interesting experiment, though one that’s damn hard to consume. It offers complete sonic terrorism, chaos theater. A hallmark of Steve Vai is extrapolating vocal lines onto the guitar. Whether it’s the track The Audience Is Listening, or Bad Horsie or Ya-Yo Gakk, which are far more successful experiments than the new gospel adventure this time around, doesn’t even matter. Simple as that. Here too, Steve Vai uses the guitar to »imitate« the gospel of a vocal sermon, which is a blend of mimicking choir singing and the lead vocal performance of singer Beverly McClellan. Let me also mention that this song has been covered by many artists over the years, and some came within a hair of it and pointed out a kind of parody (Depeche Mode, for example).
As Biblical tradition hints, the »seer John« – John The Revelator, wrote the book »Book Of The Seven Seals« in exile on the Greek island of Patmos. That’s also the title of the album’s fourth track, which is essentially an improvisational extension and upgrade of a moment that springs from the form of the song John The Revelator. It’s precisely in Book Of The Seven Seals that Vai’s bond with the character and work of Frank Zappa shows, who still counts today as the noblest fusionist of all time. After this heavier session on Vai’s new record comes pure balm for the ears. Creamsicle Sunset, a calm, dreamy instrumental propped up by a »floating guitar vibrato,« a classic Vai trick, actually very welcome in the number five spot! It nicely relieves the almost overproduced theater of musical chaos from the previous two tracks. In its captured energy, its workings and especially its arrangement vocabulary, this song joins hands with Mullach At Si.
A special moment on the album arrives in the personal, confessional The Moon And I, which counts as one of the most interesting pieces on the new record. One of the most experimentally challenging, that is. A good seven minutes of the best that the colorful and singular genius of Steve Vai can offer, once again generously serving up a juicy bag of progressive rock culture on the album. Vai touches it vocally too, but only in the opening part, so overall the song gives the impression of being an instrumental. Besides the (expectedly deliberate) »weird« melodic detours, the psychedelic blanket it creates is held up by a teasing bass line that recalls the muffled hum of a two-stroke engine idling. Brilliant. This is a song you simply have to surrender to. A full, pure-blooded and most noble dose of Steve Vai. Without a doubt one of the album’s highlights. The song was already released as a single in 2010, but over time it grew in arrangements and ideas, so Vai sensibly included it on the new album. And let’s be honest, this song adds to the album that sought-after something extra, the cherry on top that music gourmets come to Steve Vai for. A moment on the album that will in many ways blow you back to a musical moment created in 1996 and called »The Fire Garden Suite«. No More Amsterdam is a vocal song and a less interesting moment on the album, a misstep in other words, energetically inherited from the vocal numbers of the previous album.
»The Story Of Light« is a great new studio album from Steve Vai. Finally. The seven-year wait was worth it. On it Vai is once again convincingly challenging in the extravagance of his musical experimenting, fully sustaining that enticing moment of the musician’s audacity, which never stops enchanting with the esoterica of unexpected twists and the unique shock therapy of one-of-a-kind theater, created by his elusive guitar mastery. The album is superbly weighted. It offers balance. There are the harder-to-conquer parts where Vai allowed himself more daring and experimentation, and then moments on the album with more control, where the compactness and melodic appeal are reined in, as well as points where both elements within the same song, the element of experiment and the element of motivic tangibility, masterfully join hands.
Steve Vai has once again succeeded in challenging himself. The funny thing about all this is that he can’t challenge anyone but himself. And he can only beat himself, if we’re looking for a rival for him. That’s how unique an artist he is. Whatever he touches and whatever he creates. »The Story Of Light« is a great new record that takes Vai back to the era of greatest insight, the albums released in the nineties. An album that, and I’m aiming this at all the demanding music listeners out there, will definitely win you over. In everything!
Lineup
Steve Vai – guitar, vocals on tracks 8 and 11
Dave Weiner – guitar
Philip Bynoe – bass
Jeremy Colson – drums
Deborah Henson-Conant – harp
Beverly McClellan – vocals on tracks 3 and 4
Aimee Mann – vocals on track 11
Production
Steve Vai
Track list
1. The Story Of Light
2. Velorum
3. John The Revelator
4. Book Of The Seven Seals
5. Creamsicle Sunset
6. Gravity Storm
7. Mullach At Si
8. The Moon And I
9. Weeping China Doll
10. Racing The World
11. No More Amsterdam
12. Sunshine Electric Raindrops
