FIRE & ICE

"Fire & Ice" features Yngwie Malmsteen's characteristic blend of traditional heavy metal, power metal and equilibristic guitar solos. Yngwie Malmsteen's strong love for Deep Purple and especially Rainbow is as evident as always. The heavy metal style played on the album features lots of keyboards and generally belong in the softer end of the heavy metal spectrum. The most soft tracks can even be tagged AOR (albeit of the heavy kind) IMO. The musicianship is as always excellent but most of the time the band is just used to back up Yngwie Malmsteen's fiercely fast-paced neo-classical guitar shredding or the melody lines sung by Goran Edman. It's quite a shame that the band are not given more room and opportunity to show off their high level playing skills.

The production is rather weak and thin sounding and I miss bite and depth. But that's not the worst. The songwriting on "Fire & Ice" is rather generic compared to the best output by Yngwie Malmsteen and I'm even tempted to call most of the material on "Fire & Ice" the most bland output ever by the artist. The fact that the album is 68:42 minutes long means that it's quite the trial for me to get through the full album when the material is as generic as it's the case here.

So overall I don't enjoy "Fire & Ice" one bit. It's only during the solo sections that I'm at times reminded of how great an artist Yngwie Malmsteen actually is. His guitar playing is of course phenomenal. If you're new to Yngwie Malmsteen I suggest you pick up just about any other album release by him than this one. Preferably the stunning debut album. I'll play nice and give a 2 - 2.5 star rating but I really can't recommend this album.

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