This egotiscal Swedish wonder Guitarist first piqued my interest back in 1986 when a college friend played me the Marching Out album with the classic I’ll See The Light Tonight and over the years I’ve heard or have owned most of his albums, my favourites being Odyssey (Joe Lyn Turner on vocals), Facing the Animal (Mats Levin on vocals) Eclipse (Goran Edman on vocals), Inspirations (an album of covers that I would recommend to any MHR fan) and his concerto for group and guitar has made repeated returns to my CD.  I have to say that is last two albums (The war To End All Wars (with the producer by the sound of the album) and Attack) left me pretty cold, so I was not expecting much from this new album Unleash The Fury, but I have to say it’s his best since Facing The Animal!

Unleash The Fury opens with Locked And Loaded, a heavy as fuck statement of intent! Former Rainbow, Midnight Blue and Cornerstone vocalist Dougie (cool name by the way) White real is let loose on this track. The next track Revolution shows Stratovious and Dragonforce how it should be done as this along with the title track  could very easily be Stratovious songs but better (I.M.O).

Track3 Cracking The Whip has a riff that Dimebag Darrel (RIP) would have loved and features Yngwie himself on vocals (not bad but why?) and then Winds Of War starts off acoustically and then goes into heavy as hell riff. Crown Of Thorns is another heavy track that shows off the drumming skills of Patrick Johansson, whereas The Bogeyman has heavy slapped bass line and reminds one of a nu-metal track (I kid you not!)

Beauty And The Beast is a typical Yngwie complete with a high-speed double bass drum track and  Fugeita, alongside  track 18 Paraphrase, are classical guitar pieces and are inspired by J.S.Bach and bookend the album nicely. Track 9 Cherokee Warrior once again features Yngwie on vocals and I wonder if this is not his ego going all out, as he has a great vocalist on the rest of the album and I wonder why he feels the need to sing as well. (The vocals are okay just not as good as Dougie’s) Next up is Guardian Angel, which is a beautiful piece of music and could easily be used in a film soundtrack.  

Let The Good Times Roll is the son of I’ll See The Light Tonight (check out the into riff and tell me you’ve not heard it before!) but the main riff is another Dimebag Darrell style riff! and Revelation Is slow dirge of track that does little for this reviewer and then comes Magic Mayhem, which is Yngwie showing just how fast he can play along with the drummer!

Track 14.Exile is another Euro metal sounding track and The Hunt is typical mid 80’s Yngwie encompassing a very complicated riff. Russian Roulette again has echoes of the aforementioned Stratovaious, but again is much better than anything from that particular band

All in all Unleash The Fury is Yngwie's best album in years and to make it better as this CD is the Jap version it also includes three short video “lessons”. Great for any wannbe Yngwie's out there as you can slow them down and watch his fingers!

At this time I’m not aware of any UK release date for this album and as is usually the case one or more of the tracks will properly be left off. As the Jap’s must have something exclusive to combat the strength of the YEN. As this is a long album at 72:15 minutes this may not be a bad idea, but the bottom line is this, a great album and gets 8.5/10 from me and his highly recommend to his fans and fans of the bands mentioned in the review! 

And as for the comment about his ego at the start of the review, I was lucky enough about six or seven years ago to see and meet him at Fender demo evening and I saw his ego in full flight! But in his defence he’s entitled to be a big head as he invented a whole style of rock music and has influenced a million Guitarists.

Let us know your views on 'Unleash The Fury'

Track List

Locked And Loaded
Revolution
Cracking The Whip*
Winds Of War
Crown Of Thorns
The Bogeyman
Beauty And The Beast
Fugetia
Cherokee Warrior*
Guardian Angel
Let The Good Times Roll.
Revelation (Drinking With The Devil)
Magic And Mayhem
Exile
The Hunt
Russian Roulette

Line Up

Yngwie Malmstein: - All stringed Instruments, Keyboards, Backing Vocals and Lead Vocals on *
Dougie White - Vocals.
Joakim Svalberg - Keyboards
Patrick Johansson - Drums