Artist: Gilbert, Paul
Label: Mascot Records
Release: 2008
Runtime: 42:24
Rating: 4.7/5
A while back, one of Slovenia’s more perceptive music journalists, in a newspaper whose name I sadly no longer remember, wrote that it’s simply not hard to write a bad review of Rebeka Dremelj. Something similar, but in reverse, could be said about Paul Gilbert, whose inventive, varied and, at the same time, technically precise, almost nitpicky musical mind it would be extremely hard to say a bad word about.
From ’81, when the up-and-coming fifteen-year-old tried to get all the way to Ozzy through Mike Varney and his label Shrapnel records (Ozzy was looking for a new guitarist after Rhoads died), to his second full-length instrumental album, Paul has come a long way. Racer X never brought him the fame he felt he deserved, so he was thrilled when Billy Sheehan, who had left David Lee Roth in ’88, got in touch. As he confided to knowledge-hungry guitar nerds in the closing part of his instructional trilogy Terrifying guitar trip, the idea for Mr. Big was born when he and Sheehan were jamming through the repertoire of the dark-hearted Accept for fun and geeking out over Hoffmann’s riffs. After almost ten years with Mr. Big, Paul decided to go solo and, after a few lower-profile projects in which he also tried his hand at singing, he released his first instrumental album Geto out of my yard in 2007, and a year later he delighted us again with its hugely successful follow-up.
Silence followed by a deafening roar is an eclectic mix of the best guitar moves of the eighties, gnarly scale patterns, chords with bizarre notes, classical influences and Paul’s boundless inventiveness, which other albums of this kind can’t brag about. It’s precisely this intriguing weirdness, which you can pick up on both in the music and in the album’s overall look (see the cover), that sets Gilbert apart from Malmsteen, who’d probably be finished if he had to make a record that differed from all his previous ones by even a millimeter, and from Satriani, who is only listenable when he repeats himself. In that respect Gilbert is closer to Vai, but the fact that he never got the chance to play with the great Zappa ties him more to the mainstream and to music that isn’t just for guitar fanatics and connoisseurs, but that laypeople can enjoy too. If we had to reach for labels, we could call this music a kind of hi-tech hard rock, combining the friendly melodicism of the Beatles on one side with the refined precision of classical music on the other.
The title track opens the album with a sound in which Gilbert tries to get close to that deafening roar, helped along by a violin bow, followed by a riff in C-sharp minor, a variation of which also turns up in the solo section. There we can admire the fusion of two of Gilbert’s specialties, which you’d call string skipping arpeggios and three note per string scales in English. The second song, Eudamonia ouverture, starts with an impressive tapping pattern that even Van Halen wouldn’t be ashamed of, continues with a romantic leitmotif carried by nostalgic chords played in staccato technique, and wraps up with arpeggi inspired by Bach. Of course, Gilbert wouldn’t be Gilbert if he didn’t explain his techniques on the accompanying instructional DVD, which feels like a sort of educational companion to the album and with which the virtuoso successfully builds on the theories from his earlier releases of this kind. As we saw recently at Ljubljana’s Ort, Gilbert is also, and above all, a teacher (see the report from October 14, 2008). After the blues-metal extravaganza The Rhino come the glammy Norwegian cowbell and the ballad with lavish chords, I cannot tell a lie. The track Bronx 1971 is interesting mainly for the unusual key it’s written in, one guitarists don’t exactly love. However skilled a musician you are, if you’ve ever tried improvising in B-flat, you probably figured out pretty quickly that you run out of ammo in that key much sooner than a half step higher or lower, where you find the B and A pentatonic. In the accompanying DVD, Gilbert advises guitarists not to limit themselves to the familiar pentatonic positions, but to transpose them into as many different keys as possible once they’ve mastered them. The most interesting track on the album is certainly Suite modale, a classical piece written for flute and piano in 1956 by the Šivac-born American Ernst Bloch. With the help of a sustainer, a gadget for sustaining notes that Vai already made famous, Gilbert transforms rather convincingly into a flutist and paraphrases Bloch’s lofty ideas in a highly inventive way. As with most guitarists of the eighties, the classical influences are pretty pronounced in Gilbert too, which the virtuoso often admits, explaining that every time he starts writing material for a new album, he looks for inspiration mainly in Bach’s counterpoint. Bach, who in his cover repertoire is occasionally replaced by one of Harrison’s songs (e.g. It’s all too much on the album Space ship one), is also a kind of common thread through all of Gilbert’s solo albums. The last four acts of the record, The Gargoyle, I Still have that other girl (this time a cover of a song by Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach), Bultaco Saturno and Paul vs. Godzilla, are mostly variations on all the themes and techniques mentioned above.
One of Gilbert’s best decisions lately was definitely to give up singing. Not because he can’t do it, but simply because a guitar virtuoso automatically loses some of his credibility the moment he steps up to a microphone. The rare few who still successfully combine this kind of guitar perfectionism with vocals, and earn well-deserved praise for it, are Steve Lukather and the unsurpassed Eric Johnson, who’s still one of a kind in rock. Gilbert’s output thus seems more consistent without vocals, which undoubtedly benefits his reputation and recognizability. As I already wrote in the report mentioned above, real music is self-sufficient and needs no lyrics, which holds true not only for the classics but also for those modern-day geniuses (Gilbert among them) whose ideas are already so interesting and complete in themselves that any additional verbal explanation only hurts them.
Lineup
Paul Gilbert – guitar
Mike Szuter – bass
Jeff Bowders – drums
Emi Gilbert – Hammond, keyboards
Production
Paul Gilbert, Emi Gilbert
Tracklist
Silence followed by a deafening roar
Eudaimonia overture
The rhino
Norvegian cowbell
I cannot tell a lie
Bronx 1971
Suite modale
The gargoyle
I still have that other girl
Bultaco saturno
Paul vs. Godzilla
