Label: Epic Records
Release date: 05.10.2010
Production: Mike Fraser & Joe Satriani
Album length: 53.12 min
Genre: Instrumental Rock / Art Rock
Rating: 8.5 / 10
What’s left for the founding father of modern guitar rock, the one and only Joe Satriani, to say? His new studio album, whose title vaguely echoes the latest Dream Theater record (except they sing about black clouds instead of swans), is his thirteenth overall. After all these years we’ve gotten used to Satriani’s approach the way we’re used to breathing air or visiting the bathroom (as many times a day as you like). Albums have become almost a given, and you could pretty much define what’s on them in advance. The strong core of loyal music fanatics, golden-hearted music professors included, was carved out long ago, and nobody expects any special musical revolution from Joe anymore.
And yet, the guitar wizard worries that his already overstuffed schedule might somehow end up unfulfilled. You’ve probably guessed I’m thinking of the super rock band Chickenfoot. It was precisely Joe joining Chickenfoot that had the biggest positive influence on making “Black Swans And Wormhole Wizards” a somewhat different album.
It sounds warm, alive and coherent, like very few Joe 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 are fixtures on the concert tours and Satch knows them like the back of his left hand. On top of that, Campitelli is Satch’s tried-and-tested studio fixture. Satch also did something else important: he let his ego step aside and handed over the keyboard duties on some tracks to another musician. It might all seem perfectly ordinary, if that musician weren’t named Mike Keneally. Keneally is a top-class player who in his day sat behind towering racks of keyboards as a member of the crews of Frank Zappa and Zappa’s protégé Steve Vai. This time even a deaf-mute “listener” would instantly tell that for certain keyboard arrangements even Satriani is too “left-handed”!
The feeling of coherence is strong, and it sounds as if the album was recorded live in the studio with the whole quartet present, all plugged into the mixing desk channels and the power supply at once. And 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, haggling over the justifiable arguments laid down by Satriani’s current expressionism in freshly created arrangements.
This time around, Satriani’s guitar is sonically wedged into the skeleton of the instrumental backing in a way that gives no sense of pretension, no urge to sit dead center of the expression, no grabbing for attention. Sure, the center of gravity of the guitar sermon still lies in the phrases and solo escapades (it has to, otherwise Satriani’s whole charm would go down the drain), but this time there’s a much stronger sense of instrumental unity among the individual building blocks. Even just the wonderfully exposed warm hum of the bass, in whose sonic collage Satriani’s guitar noodling is slyly wrapped, gets along in a lively, dynamic, animated conversation between the two instruments, like two fishwives who’ve known each other far too well their whole lives.
Satriani also pulled off some striking detours in arranging the new material, which is a nice 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) in this role on that track, the situation is saved above all by the seasoned Keneally with his Hammond sound, and the song turns out to be a thoroughly successful trick. Right after it, Satriani’s newly discovered free-spiritedness surprises on The Golden Room, where the sound of “Satriani rock” tangles with Hindu melos in an atmospherically wonderful way. Of course, the key is once again the sparkling Keneally joining the album! The song is full of unexpected twists, built from Satriani’s heavenly soloing, the natural sound of the percussion arrangements, and a massive blanket of guitar riff and keyboard curtain mixed together. An unexpected departure for Satriani, which is a given in the case of his colleague Vai, is on the other hand more than welcome for Joe, since it actually works the most convincingly on the album, and with it Satriani credibly opens up new creative fields for his future music-making. You barely catch your breath before Two Sides To Every Story arrives, where Satriani sets off strictly into jazz waters and further exploits Keneally’s hand skills, the kind the late Joe Zawinul (Weather Report) would have envied in a heartbeat. The intense course of events is relieved for a moment by the otherwise lighter and ear-invading Wormhole Wizards, and then Satriani heads once more into the realm of dreams and (no lie!) psychedelic-cerebral eroticism in Wind In The Trees. It’s in this track that you feel the exceptional coherence between the instruments, achieved this time in the production, with most of the atmosphere again created by Keneally’s keyboards. Another absolute detour that Satriani badly needed this time to air things out and, to a decent degree, negate his almost proverbial studio predictability. This is the point of a happy sense of spontaneity and an atmosphere growing gradually, circle after circle, through the individual phrases. So Satriani added an element of unpredictability to the album, which is not exactly an everyday move for him.
Of course, there are a few songs that are Satriani shtick from head to toe. You can’t do without them, and that’s as it should be. They have to be there. The opener Premonition, with its gently mischievous accent, makes no secret of 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, to a degree, even solemn way, and it wraps up this richly expressive and varied album perfectly. Dream Song is a classic Satriani guitar rock ballad that tastefully strings together new moods and gratefully balances out the opening assault of Premonition. Pyrrhic Victoria also belongs in this rank of typical “Satchafunkilus” charisma, though it’s enriched and livened up by Keneally’s witty arrangements. And then there’s the wound-up Light Years Away, whose lead guitar phrase comes, in some subcutaneous way, closest to the rock tension of what Satriani does with Chickenfoot.
We can say that Satriani’s sermon has gained a new dimension with this album. Not in the sense of a revolutionary creative leap, but in the sense that Satriani, thanks above all to working with Chickenfoot, has rediscovered the magic word “band”, and so the new album is in production terms actually the strongest and most 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 letting the keyboards take the lead, it’s an album that will need more time to get under your skin. That very finding only confirms the newly discovered juiciness and freshness with which Satriani moves through this album, and in which the musician clearly feels more than great. Let’s hope that in the future the touch of the magic word experiment will deepen and widen his vocabulary even further. “Black Swans And Wormhole Wizards” has rewarded him richly for it.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Track list:
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)
Lineup:
Joe Satriani – guitar, bass guitar, keyboards
Allen Whitman – bass guitar
Mike Keneally – keyboards
Jeff Campitelli – drums, percussion
