Uli Jon Roth - Transcendantal Sky Guitar
SPV
Guitar Hero
Disc 1: 12 songs (50'28) Disc 2: 13 songs (70'46)
Release year: 2000
SPV
Reviewed by Chris

Well, Uli Jon Roth who's been Scorpions guitarist amongst other things recorded a double CD feature. Mr. Roth is a guitar hero, and transcendental Sky Guitar is the correct expression to use to describe his music.

I'm no very fund of guitar heroes in general, cause they usually have the bad tendency to play fu**ing fast and technical, therefor forgetting melodies along the way. Of course they're not all the same and even Malmsteen can have good melodic moments without playing 200 notes a second. Same for other guitar heroes like Satriani, Rondat, Vai or many others. Mr. Roth alternates very technical moments with transcendental melodic moments and the result is very good, but still I'm quickly bored. The thing is that to replace vocal, you must emulate it with guitar melody, so you don't miss the vocal too much.

This album contains two CDs, one call The Phoenix containing Concert Pieces and another one called The Dragon which contains Encores and Improvisations. The Phoenix will take 500 years of music through the guitar abilities of Uli Jon Roth. From Mozart to Vivaldi, Chopin and many others, classical pieces transformed into transcendental guitar tracks. The second CD will alternate covers (Hendrix mainly) and Roth own improvisation tracks, and is less interesting to me than the first CD although some moments can be very original. As for the sound, production is crystal clear (even on live tracks)

I've been hesitating whether or not I should quote this album since a lot of tracks haven't originally been written by Roth himself, he's just performing them in his own transcendantal way, but I guess there's also a lot of writting process even to play them this way so I've finally decided to quote it. In the end if you love guitar heroes then there's a good chance you might like this one too, otherwise if like me you like very specific instrumental CD you may want to check it first. Uli Jon Roth is a hell of a guitar player, now the question is, is it the kind of you like ? So like I said, you'd better check it out since this is pretty special and different from Malmsteen, Rondat or even Satriani.

Killing Songs :
some excellent moments then and there
Chris quoted 70 / 100
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