Rick Patterfield
SOiL. Scream: The Essentials. Album Review
© 2017 Pavement Entertainment PVMT 6070 | 21 track = 68'35"
The first official, a non-promo compilation of Chicago modern metallers SOiL features the piece “The Hate Song,” among others. Originally it was released on the studio album Whole (2013), the band's reunion with vocalist Ryan McCombs. And it is very surprising that the harsh musicians did not dare to call the collection Hate Songs: such a title (or, Songs of Hate) would suit this quite monumental collection much more than the somewhat vague and neutral name of Scream.
You probably already think that this introduction will be followed by about 2,000 characters of reasoning about why the author of this review does not like SOiL as well as all modern metal, as in terms of the 90s?
JOHN IVAN 2024 GuitarSlinger: A Real Guitar Record For The 2020's
JOHN IVAN, GuitarSlinger
© 2024 John Ivan Belousov / Bestia Records (number n/a), 9 tracks = 59'05"
Hope you remember the days of triumph of the mighty US label Shrapnel Records — not only the first American metal label but, far more importantly, a kind of springboard for quite a number of guitar talents all over the US and the world. With a string of albums of such great players as Tony MacAlpine and Paul Gilbert (as a member of Racer X), that label and its boss Mike Varney, a good guitar player himself, wrote the modern rock formula of what an instrumental album of the 80s and 90s should be.
Sadly, such kinds of albums of little-known or even unknown guitar virtuosos are nowadays extremely rare, but a debut solo CD by Ukrainian musician and producer John Ivan Belousov has all the generic traits of those Shrapnel Records of old. Raised on a heavy diet of Yngwie Malmsteen and, eh, aforementioned US shredders, John was once a candidate for one of the last “true” line-ups of the legendary Russian thrash metal institution Master, although his own band Bestia, based in the city of Nikolaev in Ukraine, played a pure US power/speed metal and drew many comparisons with Racer X (again!) even back in the 90s.