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 A couple of years ago I finally broke down and bought a cd player though I still loved vinyl.At a flea market I picked up this cd for a buck. It had no cover ,no case and I had no clue who the hell this guy was. Upon first listening my impression was " typical busy new band blah blah..." I listened again. And again. And again. Epiphany! Yet I was still so ignorant that I thought maybe this was some japanese bootleg of Deep Purple in disguise or something. The licks on this album remind me of Ritchie Blackmore in his heyday and the overall composition seems similar to something Jon Lord might compose. In fact some of the other titles in Yngwie's collection include cassical/rock combos. Obviously I am not a musician. I might not even know music but I know what I like . This guy can play his axe and that's the truth! I believe! Sadly,my cd is now damaged and I must get a new one . Farewell.
Malmsteen does, in fact, play with a good deal of feel and emotion on this album. His love and enthusiasm for making music show through in everything he plays here. And of course, at this point in his career, Malmsteen was still a guitar virtuoso of the highest order. Even though Deep Purple guitarist Ritchie Blackmore had been the first heavy metal guitarist to incorporate classical scales into a hard rock style, and Ozzy Osbourne's late right-hand man Randy Rhoads had perfected what would come to be known as the neoclassical style of heavy metal guitar, Malmsteen built on their work, creating a fully-formed and innovative style. Make no mistake about it: Yngwie Malmsteen is an exceptionally talented guitarist, and this album was one of the last moments where he actually demonstrated it. But what both Malmsteen's fans and his critics fail to realize is that there's a lot more to look at in his music than just instrumental prowess. "Rising Force" is made up of genuinely good songs. "Black Star" is one of the all-time great rock instrumentals; it's one of the few Malmsteen instrumental composition that's actually built around a signature riff and contains a distinguishable solo (and what a solo it is!), rather than the entire song being the solo. The same can be said for "Evil Eye" and "Little Savage." "Far Beyond the Sun" and "Icarus' Dream Suite," by contrast, feature Malmsteen using a technique that Joe Satriani would often employ: namely, letting his guitar take on the role of "lead vocalist." The real lead vocalist of Malmsteen's band, however, was a talented young self-taught singer named Jeff Scott Soto. Soto is one of the finest vocalists in all of rock music, but on this album he rarely gets a chance to show it. His vocals are only featured on two tracks, neither of which lets him show what he's capable of. "Now Your Ships Are Burned" makes terrible use of his amazing range, and "As Above, So Below" only hints at the feats of vocal brilliance he would achieve on Malmsteen's second album, "Marching Out." As it is, Soto manages to hold his own on this record and sound convincing, even while singing Malmsteen's sub-par lyrics. Both "Rising Force" and its follow-up, "Marching Out," see Yngwie Malmsteen in rare form, as his amazing instrumental talent is actually matched by the music he uses it to create. It's just a shame that most people -- including those who actually like Malmsteen's style of playing -- don't allow for him to do anything musically interesting, which is what he was most certainly doing on this album.
Sure, his ego is the size of Texas, but damn. The guy is the best lead guitarist I've ever heard. This album proves it.
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It's always hard for me to read reviews of Yngwie Malmsteen's albums, because they always tend to fall into two categories: first, the aspiring guitar players who put more emphasis on Malmsteen's skill with his instrument than his actual music and whose sense of hero worship for Malmsteen leads them to venerate his recordings based purely on the speed of his soling ("if you like REAL guitar playing, check this out!"); and second, the pretentious would-be music journalists who feel compelled to dismiss anything he does based purely on the fact that he's Yngwie Malmsteen ("he plays with no feel, it's all just mindless speed and fireworks," etc.) Neither perception of Malmsteen's work is very accurate, and both are wrong for the simple reason that there was much more to Malmsteen's early work than mere guitar pyrotechnics and flashy speed-of-light arpeggiated solos -- a fact that his worshippers don't seem to care about and that his detractors refuse to acknowledge.
