There was a time when super guitarist Joe Satriani stepped up and sang on his records. He did a decent job on 1991’s Flying In A Blue Dream, but his sporadic vocalizing forays thereafter were lost in the fog of his dizzying guitar antics. He later said: “I knew I wasn’t a singer, I was a ‘vocalizer’. I was able to vocalize, but I wasn’t actually a singer.” Satch’s guitar playing has such a melodic and engaging tone, you could say there’s a “vocalizing’ quality embedded in every lick. Without even realizing it, this style is ever more apparent on the 2015 release Shockwave Supernova.
Co-produced with John Cuniberti and recorded at Skywalker Sound in Lucas Valley, CA, Shockwave Supernova teams Satriani up with keyboardist and guitarist Mike Keneally, drummer Marco Minnemann and bassist Bryan Beller – pretty much his road band for the last couple years, although the association with Keneally, a former Zappa sideman and legend to many in tight music circles, goes back to 2010. The musicianship, the magical spark and a unique sense of adventure that Satriani exhibited on Surfing With The Alien is still very much intact on Shockwave Supernova.
Satriani has described the album as a concept record about a guy named Shockwave Supernova, an alter ego the guitarist assumes when he walks on stage. Each song, he says, represents a phase in Shockwave’s performing life. So the title track boasts a rigid lift-off, heavy and smooth before Satriani establishes the “voice” of his guitar to carry the melody forward. Minnemann and Beller are locked in at the hip while Keneally reinforces the musicality, adding a light tapping piano on the verses and filling in on the turn-arounds.
Like Jeff Beck, Satriani is all about creating soaring, over-arching tonal qualities, oozing with arpeggios and texture, within tightly arranged chord sequences in a salient effort to expand musical dimensions. Tracks like “Lost Is In Memory” and “”On Peregrine Wings” follow this line, and never lose their balance or momentum. You can get thrown off course by something like “Crazy Joey,” where the guitarist slices up scads of notes like a ninja warrior after three cups of Caramel Macchiato. We already know he can play the damn instrument – it’s more about letting the music develop and evolve within a simple and viable context, open with space to explore, sequenced enough to make it less of an exercise and more of a journey; in this case, the journey of Shockwave Supernova.
So we hit “play’ and off we go as “Cataclysmic” dances and dips like the sun setting down in an exotic and distant land; drink from the cool waters that sonically leak from “Keep On Movin,” with Kenneally’s keys equally measured against Satriani’s guitar in attack and sustain. Now, imagine yourself on a deserted island with “All Of My Life” playing in the background, or dig how “A Phase I’m Going Through” is an articulate piece of some of Satriani’s finest fret work, administered in even-handed stanzas. “Butterfly And Zebra” allows the guitarist to sonically emulate an unlikely match (and pay tribute to his hero Jimi Hendrix) with a true voice at its center, before conjuring a measured sense of hellfire on “If There’s No Heaven.”
Kenneally sets “Stars Race Across The Sky” in motion with an alluring piano vamp that gives Satriani reign to wander. He carries this through to the end with “Goodbye Supernova” laying the concept to rest on a solemn note. Satriani angles for closure amidst a lightly orchestrated, winding in and out of a dense melody. Most of all, it provides the cohesiveness that loosely sways within the whole of Shockwave Supernova. Indeed, to get the full effect, you have to track through the entire album. With the wraparound shades and space suit, Joe Satriani aka Shockwave Supernova lets his guitar do the singing at every point of the journey.
~ Shawn Perry
