Label: Sony Music
Release date: 10.04.2020
Production: Jim Scott
Album length: 46.35 min
Genre: Instrumental Rock / Art Rock
Rating. 9.0 / 10
Joe Satriani, the bronze guitar sorcerer, a.k.a. the “silver guitar aviator”, is back with his honest-to-goodness eighteenth studio album. The first and foremost ambassador of the solar system when it comes to guitar-driven instrumental rock made a few bold moves on the new record, “Shapeshifting”, to step away from what he offered on his previous albums, say the last three. He changed everything. From the studio to the crew working with him in it. Producer included.
The man has, artistically speaking, said practically everything he had to say to the masses a long time ago. He himself certainly doesn’t see it that way. His new musical confession doesn’t bring earthquakes or shift the planet’s magnetic poles, but still. With “Shapeshifting”, Satriani has delivered an album that speaks differently when you compare it to the last three. It carries songs that alternate with each other in expression, both in the choice of rhythmic keys and in the way they pull away from each other in genre, or in their fusion of genres. “Shapeshifting” isn’t as “democratic” as, say, “Shockwave Supernova” (RockLine review HERE) or “What Happens Next” (RockLine review HERE), which boast a bigger dose of experimentation and jamming, and on which Satriani left more room for the other building blocks of the songs’ sound to spread out (they felt more “band-like”). “Shapeshifting” puts the guitar back in the clear, unmistakable position of the expressive center. Not completely, true, since Joe can still very slyly bow to keyboard structures (Waiting) where that suits the mood he’s building, or grab an acoustic guitar and strum away so pleasantly in the background, but still. For the most part, the album is focused primarily on the stories told by his guitar, which this time around is once again substantially dominant.
Production-wise, the album is crystal clear, highly sophisticated and sonically refined. The building blocks of the sound picture, drums and bass guitar especially, build an enormous depth and width of sonic spectrum that Satriani’s guitar playing slots into. The sound hits you hard in a bombastic way, yet for all its finesse it keeps a high level of warmth! The responsibility for this difference lies first and foremost with producer Jim Scott, and of course with the “squad” of instrumentalists keeping Joe company in the studio this time, all of them old acquaintances. Kenny Aronoff has worked with Chickenfoot, Chris Chaney on some of Satch’s earlier releases, and then there’s the outstanding sonic experimenter and keyboardist Eric Caudieux, who especially tuned in to Satriani’s guitar playing and came up with some particularly witty sonic pastels that add a very special charm and tint to the album, while reinforcing the character, emotion or passion in the language of the guitar playing. In character, the guitar is extremely “elusive” this time. Every track is a self-contained story, with Satch striking a brand-new arrangement compromise (the definition of the arrangement: rhythm and style) at every turn.
The album is emphatically personal and intimate. On it, Satriani even travels back to the carefree eighties, as made clear in Nineteen Eighty, where he pays tribute to the character of his Squares (Eddie Van Halen sound and a classic rock’n’roll rally full of nostalgia), then in Big Distortion, which catapults you straight into some sold-out eighties stadium with 120,000 people, and you’re standing alone in a beam of light while, over pouty reverb and distorted phrasing, all 240,000 hands in the place clap along (in dance-music rhythm). The wound-up Spirits, Ghosts And Outlaws joins Nineteen Eighty in the energy department too. In these moments the album embodies the sentiment of the golden days, when Satriani was putting out albums like “The Extremist” or “Surfing With An Alien”. Joe remains an “eternal big kid” and radiates bubbling, boundless optimism throughout. That’s true of the new album too, which gives the listener just as many fun and lucid moments, as with Ali Farka, Dick Dale, an Alien and Me, where, as the title hints, he blends Arabic ornaments (rhythm included) and surf elements to wonderfully successful effect, while the “alien” is really Eric on vintage synthesizer textures. Definitely a track that stands out on the album with its insightful structure, and something we haven’t heard from Satch before. Another special detour worth highlighting is the reggae excursion in Here the Blue River, where Satch colors the lead phrase and rhythm with excursions that, in playing and sound, come close to stringing together “soundscapes”.
There are moments of rich sophistication here, taken over by exceptional refinement, sonic splendor and the undulating building blocks of a strung-together soundscape, with incredible contemplation, or a high degree of mutual reconciliation in perception, which is what the tenderness of All For Love and Teardrops expresses, as does the mysticism of Falling Stars. The “ring-around-the-rosie” song structures of All My Friends Are Here, an absolute celebration point, and the closing, light and whistle-“colored” Yesterday’s Yesterday provide a heaping helping of fun and playfulness.
“Shapeshifting” is an album where Satriani managed to deliver exactly what he set out to. A set of thirteen tracks with wildly different characters that paint a vivid picture of the personality, or rather the musical dossier, of his guitar playing. It even feels autobiographical, since with some of the moves Satriani very effectively takes an energetic, nostalgic stroll down his musical path, right back to the beginnings of his career. At every moment Satch stays highly alert, in exactly the right place as he goes about his business, and keeps that familiar, internalized, amusingly “elusive” element of cheeky playfulness. Artistically, the album is in no way surprising. But it does deliver a noticeable departure from what Satch had been offering in the later years of his career. For Satriani, a more than welcome transition, an artistic refresh and, all in all, another very successful feat.
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Tracklist:
1. Shapeshifting
2. Big Distortion
3. All For Love
4. Ali Farka, Dick Dale, an Alien And Me
5. Teardrops
6. Perfect Dust
7. Nineteen Eighty
8. All My Friends Are Here
9. Spirits, Ghosts And Outlaws
10. Falling Stars
11. Waiting
12. Here the Blue River
13. Yesterday’s Yesterday
Lineup:
Joe Satriani – guitar
Eric Caudieux – keyboards
Chris Cheney – bass guitar
Kenny Aronoff – drums
Lisa Coleman – piano on track no. 11, mandolin on track no. 13
