Self-released
Release date: July 10, 2020
Production: Kiko Loureiro
Album length: 52.57 min
Genre: Progressive Metal / Instrumental
Rating: 9.0/10
If you’re a guitarist making your own guitar albums, meaning instrumental albums, all you need is a bassist and a drummer and you’ve got the foundation for a proper record. Well, sort of. You can play the bass yourself, even the drums, or you can just “click” them in next to the guitars in the end. Why this intro? Because of the pandemic chaos that the new studio album from the great guitar virtuoso Kiko Loureiro stumbled into the world through. The man, who once visited Ljubljana on a few guitar clinics, is best known for lifting the curse off Megadeth fans, the one that said Mustaine would never produce another good studio album before the end of his career. “Dystopia”, the first Megadeth album released after Loureiro joined, wow, a good three and a half years ago, is a fascinating piece of work. Megadeth have a new one up their sleeve already, but that’s another story.
Regarding the title of his new album “Open Source”, Loureiro explained that the name refers to software whose source code can be constantly modified, spread around and is available to everyone. Kiko carried that concept over into music while making the new album, inviting all the fans of his music to take part in its creation. So Kiko first created the songs, but that didn’t mean the album was finished. It was available to everyone interested, who got access to these compositions and could rework them creatively. Following the call of their own creative inspiration. From a sonic remix to adding their own ideas to reshaping the arrangements. What happened in the end, we don’t know, but the album is once again, from head to toe, steeped in one and only one thing. Kiko and his unique charisma of guitar playing, of course.
Loureiro is known as a founding member of the Brazilian progressive metal veterans Angra. No wonder that on last year’s European club tour he was joined on stage by bassist Felipe Andreoli and drummer Bruno Valverde, both members of the current Angra lineup. He kept both of them for the recording of “Open Source” too, with Andreoli also having played on its predecessor “Sounds Of Innocence”, released eight years ago.
Put simply and bluntly, the album “Open Source” is everything you could possibly want from Kiko Loureiro. It’s a blend of progressive metal engraved with the signature charisma of this top-notch guitarist, defined by a venomously pouting combination of neoclassical musical picturesqueness, sorties of bristling “shredding” phrasing, arpeggio salvos often laced with tapping, with no shortage of switching between staccato and legato within the same phrase, and the almost proverbial knack for sudden leaps between extremely fast and more carefully placed harmonies. In short, welcome to the paradise of breakneck guitar acrobatics. And one more thing has to be added. Everything we hear on this album is steeped in the true-believer passion of Latin temperament, and there are quite a few associations in the compositional ideas that keep calling for a great reconciliation of Kiko’s phrases with the character and work of Angra. That feeling is deepened throughout the album by the progressively minded, exploratory and dynamic rhythm section, which is one way or another an integral part of Angra’s lineup and which brilliantly buddies up with Kiko’s musical philosophy and clicks with it. The chemistry of the trio is fascinating and tight all the way through. The track that sums up all this vividness of the album’s sharpened ideas in one single place is definitely Sertão. It delivers one of the album’s highlights. It’s not all about “burning it down.” On Dreamlike, Kiko offers a glimpse into his more sensitive and subtle side of composing instrumental guitar mini-suites. Then there’s also a “wild one” on the album, like Black Ice. Imagine Vivaldi were Brazilian and tried to play parts of Flight of the Bumblebee on guitar.
Marty Friedman jumped in as a special guest on the track Imminent Threat. So we have a situation where a member of the current Megadeth lineup and a member of a former one play on the same track, letting Megadeth fans now compare in one breath which of the two is better. Kiko accompanied Friedman’s guest spot on Imminent Threat with this comment: “I’ve always been a big fan of his project Cacophony, his solo albums, and the albums he recorded with Megadeth!” The contrasting dialogue bends under the weight of perfection and brilliance, and hints that Friedman and Loureiro could record a new album together, one that could in many ways dry the tears on the cheeks of all fans of both Cacophony releases, who know full well that there will never be a third Cacophony album.
The album is full of bubbling freshness and diverse ideas that piled up over time, because eight years is a pretty big gap between Kiko’s new album and the previous one. Ideas woven into colorful progressive metal instrumentals, steeped in a staggering grasp of neoclassical lessons, all of it riding vehemently on the wings of razor-sharp alertness and the sensuality of Latin temperament and instinct. A fan of jaw-dropping guitar shenanigans simply can’t ask for more. All of this shines through intensely in every musical peculiarity of Kiko’s new album. Not that it wasn’t quietly expected, after all. A top-notch new album, then, that will keep thrilling (and inspiring) the planet’s guitar “geeks” and their love of breakneck feats for a good while!
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Track list:
1. Overflow
2. EDM (e-Dependent Mind)
3. Imminent Threat
4. Liquid Times
5. Sertão
6. Vital Signs
7. Dreamlike
8. Black Ice
9. In Motion
10. Running With the Bulls
11. Du Monde
Lineup:
Kiko Loureiro – guitar, keyboards, programming
Felipe Andreoli – bass guitar
Bruno Valverde – drums
Guest musician:
Marty Friedman – guitar on track no. 3
