Galneryus - Between Dread and Valor (2023)

Country: Japan
Style: Neo-Classical Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 14 Feb 2023
Sites: Facebook | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

I don't know why Galneryus aren't better known in the west. Maybe they just haven't played live a lot outside of their native Japan, but this is music ought to would play well in Europe. That most of the songs are sung in a combination of Japanese and English shouldn't matter at all. What should is that this is furious power metal with such a focus on the frenetic guitarwork of Syu, the one and only remaining founding member, that it could easily be classified instead as neo-classical metal. Syu shreds but he does it within a very power metal framework. Only the relatively brief bookends are instrumental but I'd happily listen to an instrumental version of this album.

The vocalist here is Masatoshi Ono, who's been with Galneryus since 2010 but also maintains a solo career, which has led him to perform the theme tunes to a number of anime series. He's clearly an immensely capable singer and the bonus track at the end of this album is a cover version of one of his own songs, but he has a constant challenge to make his vocals stand out above the guitars. He does good work from the opener proper, Run to the Edge, a nine minute epic, but he doesn't truly make himself obvious until Let Us Shine, ironically given that it's that song that also features the most outrageous guitar solo. Bravehearts allows him to break through too, but only 祈, the bonus track on which he covers himself, is truly a vocal piece.

Everyone else in the band acquits themselves well, Lea's drums perhaps the most obvious behind the guitars, but it all comes back to Syu. The album starts out with a guitar solo, literally fading in to a guitar workout that could well have been running for an hour beforehand. This is the intro, a short piece called Demolish the Wickedness! that's entirely instrumental. The other instrumental piece is the outro, A Piece of Souls, which is surprising because it's a keyboard piece, to give some time in the spotlight for Yuhki, who does good work throughout but, like Ono, is rarely the focus in earlier songs. He does get a few decent solos of his own, the one on Time Will Tell particularly tasty, with Taka's bass taking up the baton before Syu takes over once again.

Run to the Edge is not instrumental, but it often seems like it is, because the guitar takes over so well and so frequently that we almost forget that Ono is there to dish out lyrics. There are enough of them to make it seem like being in this band makes sense to him, but not so many that we would ever believe that this is music led by vocals. Even when he's in full flight on a song like Bravehearts where he soars like a pirate ship in full sail, we're still often listening to whatever Syu is conjuring up behind him, which usually tends to be frantic and dynamic. Only that bonus song is his, because it literally is.

I was sold on Syu's talent on the opening intro but he gets better as the album runs on until he's a constant backdrop and we start to take his contributions as the reality we live in and start to focus on the other things happening around him: Ono's vocals and the drops to quiet piano or keyboard atmosphere. He's so relentless on Let Us Shine, though, that he steals our attention back again, a solo that transforms into a videogame, like he's an ever-growing snake shimmying every which way to avoid touching anything and impossibly making it through the five hundredth level intact while we watch. It's a blistering solo and we have to remember to breathe throughout.

I'm not sure if I've heard Galneryus before, but they've been around since 2001, starting in Osaka but later moving to Tokyo. This is their sixteenth album, with no gap between exceeding two years, even during COVID. Had I been paying attention, I could have reviewed Into the Purgatory in 2019 and Union Gives Strength in 2021. Hopefully reviewing Between Dread and Valor in 2023 will keep them on my radar and maybe add them to yours too.

Vinnie Moore - Soul Shifter (2019)

Country: USA
Style: Neo-Classical Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 9 Oct 2019
Sites: Facebook | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

Back in the late eighties when guitar shredders seemed to be falling out of the woodwork, I found many of them tedious. There were exceptions. Steve Vai made very interesting music and I really dug Tony McAlpine and Vinnie Moore, who were both part of that scene but found a lot more texture than the norm. Nowadays, the genre is more palatably named neo-classical metal, but that's a name that brings to mind Yngwie Malmsteen rather than Vinnie Moore, who's also been a fantastic guitarist for UFO since 2003.

This is a hard rock album as much as it is a neo-classical metal album, with a lot of funk and jazz to flavour it. It can't be too surprising to find the funk dominating the opening track, Funk Bone Jam, but it's overt in Kung Fu Grip too, which is also a lot more interesting musically, reminding in turns of Jeff Beck, Steve Vai's talkative guitar and, with the liquid tone midway, even Peter Frampton.

In between those two tracks is a more soulful piece, Same Sun Shines, which is the only song here that reminds of me of another piece of music, not that I can place what. I just feel like I've heard these melodies before and the track plays out rather like an instrumental take on a vocal piece, with the lead guitar replacing a voice.

After them comes Mystified and Brother Carlos, less instrumentals and more a pair of solos, as focused as they are on Moore's pure and fluid guitar which soars and wheels and swoops. It's great stuff from Moore but less great from whoever else is here backing him up, because they have very little to do but keep a vague texture in place behind him. The other most famous name here is Rudy Sarzo.

Fortunately that isn't the case on everything here as those other musicians do get their moments in the spotlight, like the bass in Funk Bone Jam, and a lot more to do on other songs, like Soul Rider. This is a lesser piece, even if it's still a good one, but it's constructed well so that those musicians get the chance to actually contribute some talent rather than just hold back to showcase the guitar hero on the cover.

There's some of that in Gainesville Station too, which turns into a southern rock song, right down to the honky tonky piano that shows up late on. This could be a solo showcase stuck halfway into a Lynyrd Skynyrd song like Call Me the Breeze. This variety is one of the reasons the album is as good as it is and it's one of the reasons that Mind's Eye stood out for me back in 1986 when Moore was a young shredder on the rise.

A few years ago, we flew over to Scotland so that we could be at the wedding of my best friend growing up. I honestly delayed the flight out for one day so that I could see UFO live at Joe's Grotto, a tiny and, as of this week, a late lamented live music venue here in Phoenix. They blew me away and Moore was a key part of why. Of course, he has a specific job to play in UFO which prevents him from taking the sort of musical avenues that he can take on his solo albums. I just hope UFO fans buy them to see what else Moore can do.

Here, they'll find that he can play like other guitar heroes, whether they be vaguely namechecked (like who do you think Brother Carlos is about?) or reasonably obvious (Mirage feels very much like a Jeff Healey song to me). They'll find that he can dance seamlessly from one genre to the next, with a rock song following a soul song, which following a funk song. They'll find, without much surprise, that he's damn good at doing whatever he feels like doing. And, while I learned that in 1986 listening to Mind's Eye, I do feel that he's matured immensely over the decades.

If you don't know Vinnie Moore yet, go see UFO live and buy this.

Aeon Bridge - Revelations (2019)

Country: USA
Style: Neo-Classical Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 8 Feb 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Metal Archives | Twitter | YouTube

OK, this one caught me by surprise! I came into it thinking it was speed metal but it's really neo-classical metal, albeit not the usual shred album because everything on it is programmed and all by one lady, Jackie Regz, for whom Aeon Bridge is a solo project—and a prolific one too, given that this is her sixth album under this name since 2017. She also handles programming for a technical death metal band called Beyond Flesh.

It took me a little while to get used to this, for a number of reasons, from the lack of bass to the unmistakable electronic edge. The hardest to get used to is the fact that some of Lightning Strikes Twice, the opening track, sounds like someone playing a 33rpm album at 45rpm, with the associated increase in pitch, but, after a couple of listens, the variety that Regz put into the song becomes clear and I have to say that I rather like how she put this album together.

As you might expect for a neo-classical metal project, there's a strong focus on recognisable classical music but I'm hearing a couple of different takes on the concept.

For instance, there's an interpretation of The Hut of Baba Yaga, one of those great Russian classical pieces that sounds metal even in its original form. It comes from Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition and it seems to my memory to be a relatively direct translation of the material. It's an interesting one to be sure, with a diverse palette of sounds, but it isn't a surprising one.

The other approach is to take a recognisable piece as a base, in this instance a couple of the movements from Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, and then compose, often wildly, over the top of them. At least, that's what I think is happening here. We hear the melody we know, but we also hear a lot more besides that I'm pretty sure we wouldn't hear down at our local symphony hall. Maybe I need to go back to Beethoven; I always dug the Russian composers more.

I don't recognise anything else here on that scale, though there are excerpts from Bach, Mozart and Paganini caught up within other tracks for those with a classical background to notice and I would expect that to be the majority of those buying Aeon Bridge albums. Regz knows her base.

What's perhaps most notable here is that the originals are as interesting as the time honoured material. Lightning Strikes Twice is a blitzkrieg that feels almost like an assault the first time through, but one which deepens considerably on repeat listens. Perhaps my favourite track on the album is Aeon Eternal (Love Song for the Anxious), which is experimental in nature and very rewarding, something we might expect from Joe Satriani. There's funk in here (and some recognisable bass at last) but the soloing is catchy and notable.

Everything here is instrumental except for a brief poem during Lord Renegade and the final track, Inferno, which features death growls from Jacob Rabin, who also provided guest solos on a couple of other tracks. Hearing fast and frantic death with the programming sound of Regz is yet another fascinating angle to this album, like an electronic Venom, and I wonder if this is what Beyond Flesh sound like.

I have no idea what the audience is for a project like Aeon Bridge, but while I'm impressed by Regz's obvious talent as a musician, I find myself impressed even more by her ability to keep an admirable variety on this album.