UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE

In the artist description above Angel Vivaldi (I am not still not sure this is a real name, because it sounds so cheesy! :)) is said to have a djenty tone. Well, if you consider Swedish band Meshuggah as forefathers of djent, this has some complicated riffs, but is not Meshuggah. It's technical, but not extreme (I am referencing the style as classified here on PA). Think more of a neoclassical guitar shredder (let's take Joe Satriani as a fellow Italian-American from the New York-New Jersey area), but more metallic, dense and generally overdriven. I could personally do without the constant double kick drumming, which is here for pure technicality's sake and is mixed too prominently. The artist's progginess, I guess, is derived here from high level of technicality and free-form structures.

This is a 4-song instrumental EP, but so dense that it feels like a complete album. Cool album concept, by the way. I would personally prefer a little more diversity in sound, for example, clean guitar breaks, continuing the same theme, but without the overdrive, which worked so well on an earlier song, Acid Reign (Angel Vivaldi has more records than it is listed here, by the way). But the guy's skill is undoubtably very high.

Just like his namesake before him, Vivaldi has made a song cycle based on the four seasons. This time, however, the Vivaldi name has produced, instead of a orchestral work, a 4 track EP of short instrumental guitar heavy tracks in a djent metal style. The neo-guitar gods of today aren't exactly the same as the guitar gods of yesteryear, namely Malmsteen, Vai, or so on. Now, they use musicians that are just as talented as they are. Does this make the music that the solo guitar artist puts out any better?

Well, in the case of this EP "Universal Language", not that much. What you get here are 4 tracks of extremely ripping guitar where each track basically sounds like the last one. After time, you start to pick out a melody or two, but in the end, it sounds like a very talented individual jamming on his guitar, with a band backing him up. With the djent style, you get that crazy drumming, which is actually more of a nuisance and actually distracts from everything.

In other words, there is a hell of a lot of talent in the performance, but not so much in the song craft. In the end, you get some wild jamming tunes that really don't contribute, at least in my mind, to the topic at hand. I mean, yes these are 4 tracks about the seasons, but they could have just as easily been tracks about each of the individual 3 little pigs and the big bad wolf. They just sound like 4 heavy guitar jamming tracks, without any spotlight on anyone else. Sometimes it makes me wonder if the artist can play with emotion, or can they only play rapid fire notes and riffs. It's useless to describe the tracks in that they all sound the same when it comes down to it. In the end, there really is no satisfaction in listening to it all.

Those that love heavy guitar solo jamming will love this, no doubt. For me, I have nothing against guitar solos, but there has to be some songcraft to the entire rigmarole, otherwise, it's hard to tell the difference, at least at first glance and even later to a slightly lesser effect, from one track to the other. Yeah there's talent and great production, but as far as ingenuity, it's all just average. 3 stars.