Unknown Soldier

This is the section where I discuss what I think is a contentious album that came out in the year and will fall under one of the following highlighted. 1) An album that a large section of musical followers (critics and fans) rate highly and despite not seeing the album as bad, I still don’t really get the attraction. 2) A hugely significant album that was highly commercial but not really good enough for the main list, but still worth a mention. 3) Basically an album that’s a pile of crap and the artist really shouldn’t have released it.


Verdict
The 1980s would see the dominance of the guitar maestro in metal as the actual frontman himself, which is no surprise given the fact that heavy metal had technical guitarists like Eddie Van Halen, Michael Schenker and Randy Rhoads etc, who at times were often treated as separate entities to the band’s that they actually belonged to. Sweden’s Yngwie Malmsteen would very much be a product of this new breed of metal musician and he would go onto the reach the pinnacle of guitar perfection with his debut solo album Rising Force. Yngwie Malmsteen would virtually lay down ‘technical guitar perfection’ for neo-classical devotees on Rising Force and he would very much be a cornerstone of metal throughout the rest of the decade. Yngwie Malmsteen had a been a fanatical disciple of Ritchie Blackmore’s neo-classical leanings on those early Rainbow albums and the name Rising Force is taken from the ‘Rising’ on the Rainbow album. The first real student of this Ritchie Blackmore neo-classical style had been Randy Rhoads, but with his premature rockstar death Yngwie Malmsteen would take over this mantle. Before releasing Rising Force Yngwie Malmsteen had already been based in California for a number of years, as he had been invited to join the glam metal band Steeler for their debut album (see 1983 review) before jumping ship to join Graham Bonnet on the debut Alcatrazz album No Parole from Rock ‘n’ Roll, which is probably one the best albums that I never reviewed here. Rising Force consists of eight tracks and all are unsurprisingly written by Malmsteen himself. The almost forty minutes playing time of the album are just full of guitar obliteration in the neo-classical sense by Yngwie Malmsteen, as he displays his chord progressions, harmonic scales and classical imitations to a dazzling level of perfection, and this is all achieved at blistering speed which would be the envy of many a guitarist at the time. It would be wrong of me to ignore the other contributions on this album so I won’t and these most notably come from Jeff Scott Soto who was a dominant vocalist especially designed for a hard rock outfit, and he would go onto feature as a vocalist with countless bands (even though I never liked him when he fronted Journey in the 00’s) his tenure with Yngwie Malmsteen kind of reminds me of Gary Barden’s time with Michael Schenker, in that both vocalists were overshadowed by their guitar masters as it were, even though Gary Barden had a lot more freedom than Jeff Scott Soto. Jens Johansson plays keyboards and features on a lot of these early Yngwie Malmsteen albums and a whole load of others before finally ending up with Stratovarius in the 1990s. Finally and strangely enough there is Barriemore Barlow on drums of Jethro Tull fame, who to be fair is a drummer I would hardly imagine to be playing on this type of album. Rising Force is quite simply both a neo-classical and guitar wankery album (as in when the guitarist is the principal highlight) and to be fair both these descriptions have never really been my thing in music, but as with most things there are always going to be exceptions to any rule. The simple fact of the matter is, I really like Rising Force as an album on selected listens and especially the "Little Savage" track, which is all a surprise as it’s a neo-classical album full of guitar wankery, hell Jeff Scott Soto doesn’t get to sing until track three and that’s like 10 minutes into the album and then disappears for most of the rest of the album! As said I like this album and it’s probably the only album of its type that I actually do like and the reason that it didn’t make this year’s list, is that I genuinely had nowhere to put it in a ‘top 20 context’ it's also a highly contentious album amongst many listeners out there, so I thought this was an ideal home for it. Anybody that hasn’t listened to Rising Force should do so, because most of the instrumentals are accomplished listens and the album is a cornerstone of the genre.

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