Passion and Warfare ~ Steve Vai

Steve Vai knows how to use a guitar and can do some pretty fancy things with one... but listening to the album I couldn't help but think to myself 'if only he could channel that awesomeness into a great song'. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy this album and think it's great stuff, but it's more a showcase of what he can do on a guitar and not so much an attempt at amazing song writing. You could say that the album lacks soul. So while I will enjoy it when I listen to it, I have to be in the mood for it because it's not a song I'm listening to, it's technique.

Something that kind of bugged me a bit in this album was the talking aspects of the songs. Like, the most prominent example, in the song 'the audience is listening', the supposed premise is that an elementary school aged Vai is going to play a composition for his class and his teacher is glowing with praise, but as he starts to play she says it's too loud and wild and bad mouths it... throughout the whole song. Trying a bit too hard to capture that something else. Rebel yell a bit less.

I think the deal with this guy is that he was a student of Joe Satriani, or they had some sort of relationship like that... and I'm sorry to say but he has a ways to go in comparison.