Yngwie J. Malmsteen - Rising Force (1984)^{Release ID: 7315}

Yngwie Malmsteen’s 1984 debut, ‘Rising Force’, is the album that inspired a whole generation to grab a guitar and learn how to play it really, really fast, as well as giving birth to what’s known as the neoclassical subgenre, a hybrid of metal guitar playing with classical music themes. It’s a highly influential album. But does it hold up well today?

Not really.

I went into this album with some intrigue. The outspoken Malmsteen has never been too modest to tell us underlings of his superior musical abilities, so I was interested to see what the fuss was about. And to be honest, I find it pretty boring. Don’t get me wrong, he plays with absolute precision and intensity, and no doubt in 1984 this was groundbreaking stuff. But by today’s standards, it just sounds like the same recycled classical lick played over and over.

There are a few songs with vocals which aren’t too bad, ‘Now Your Ships Are Burned’ and ‘As Above, So Below’, and in this aspect Malmsteen’s playing suits the music well. But for the most part, I just find this album dull, with all the songs serving as a self-indulgent excuse to play the same guitar scales as fast as possible.

Except for one song; ‘Icarus’ Dream Suite Op. 4’.

Wow! Where did this come from?! I can tolerate mindless shredding here, because the melodies when the song slows down are incredible. The clean guitar playing, the keyboards, everything here just comes together perfectly! This song itself is pretty damn amazing, and while ‘Rising Force’ generally bores the hell out of me, this song alone is enough for me to at least come back for more and see what else the master of men can conjure up.

No doubt this is highly regarded by fans, and in particular, by other guitarists, as a classic. But it just doesn’t work for me.

Lars Johan Yngve Lannerback (otherwise known as Yngwie J. Malmsteen) was born into a musical family in Stockholm in 1963 & formed his first band at just twelve years of age. As a teenager he immersed himself in classical music with 19th Century Italian violin virtuoso Niccolo Paganini & 18th Century German composer Johann Sebastian Bach becoming a complete obsession. But it was years earlier when a seven year-old Yngwie first saw that famous footage of Jimi Hendrix smashing & burning his guitar on stage that he knew where his destiny would ultimately lead him. Deep Purple & Rainbow guitarist Ritchie Blackmore quickly began to compete with the classical composers for a young Yngwie’s attention & he began developing an innovative & virtuosic technique that would see him redefining what was possible with the guitar a decade later.

In 1978, Yngwie recorded a demo tape that would end up in the hands of Shrapnel Records label head Mike Varney in the United States in 1982. Mike was obsessed with guitar heroes but the potential he heard in this young shredder was on another level to anything he’d previously encountered. So when Mike’s new Shrapnel recruits Steeler agreed to upgrade their guitarist in 1983 Mike new just the guy for the job. He contacted Malmsteen who was easily convinced to relocate to the United States to chase his rock star dream. Yngwie’s short tenure in Steeler saw him becoming the main drawcard for the band's self-titled debut album & this resulted in an offer to join one of his idols in former Rainbow & MSG front man Graham Bonnett with his new hard rock outfit Alcatrazz. After blazing away on their debut studio album “No Parole For Rock ‘n’ Roll” as well as a subsequent live album, Yngwie was offered a solo deal with Polydor Records which would see him releasing his “Yngwie J.Malmsteen’s Rising Force” album in 1984.

Now I’ve had an extremely long relationship with this record so revisiting it has opened up more than the odd memory from my childhood. I first discovered Yngwie through a song called “Heaven Tonight” from his 1988 album “Odyssey” & picked up the full album a short time later. I can distinctly remember my absolute amazement at what this guy was capable of upon first encountering him. I was well acquainted with the guitar hero concept at the time but Yngwie was in league all of his own. The style of the music wasn’t exactly my cup of tea but I was thoroughly enthralled with what this guitarist was doing with his instrument so I found myself continually returning for more. I quickly accumulated the rest of Yngwie’s back catalogue in the first three albums “Rising Force”, “Marching Out” & “Trilogy” & as much as I don’t like to admit it, I have a strong knowledge of all of them. But it really was the debut that was the most influential on me. Partly because it’s more instrumental than the others & leaves a lot less room for cheesy vocal & keyboard hooks. But that’s certainly not all there is to it because this record really did sound like nothing else that was available at the time & it managed to define a new subgenre in the process. 

Rising Force was somewhat of an international super group with Yngwie having recruited former Jethro Tull drummer Barriemore Barlow, Swedish keyboard virtuoso Jens Johansson (who would later go on to play for Dio & Stratovarius) & talented hard rock singer Jeff Scott Soto (who would later go on to front well-known US AOR group Journey) while he opted to fill the empty bass guitar role himself. There’s no question that the sum of those talents combine to form a pretty powerful heavy metal unit but you rarely lose sight of the band leader as his virtuosity often defies believe.

The production job isn’t ideal as the rhythm guitars are somewhat dwarfed by the rhythm section but this leaves plenty of room for the lead guitar tracks which is understandable I guess. I would definitely have preferred some more power from the rhythm guitar tracks though. Interestingly the engineering & mixing of “Rising Force” was handled by a gentlemen by the name of Lester Claypool who would later go on to make a name for himself as the fantastically talented bass-playing front man from Californian funk metallers Primus. 

Now you may or may not have heard of the term “neoclassical metal” before but this record is certainly the origin of this fairly niche subgenre. You can very clearly hear Yngwie’s classical background & he seems to have developed an entirely new method for playing the guitar by trying to replicate the enormously talented Pagganini’s violin technique with enormously wide vibrato, ridiculously precise & impossibly speedy melodic runs & a little-known & extremely challenging right-hand technique known as sweep-picking that would soon take the world by storm. The roots of sweep-picking actually go way back to the 1950’s with various jazz guitarists like Les Paul, Tal Farlow & Barney Kessel having employed it in a more primitive fashion but it’s likely that Yngwie first heard it used by his idols Ritchie Blackmore & Uli Jon Roth in the 70’s. No one had taken it to the level that we would hear on “Rising Force” though with Yngwie virtually developing his entire technique around it & implementing it so fluidly into his runs that my jaw’s left lying on the ground still to this day. And when you combine the dazzling technique with some exotic melodic runs that have clearly been borrowed from classical music then you get a sound that took the classically influenced rock & metal stylings of Randy Rhoads & Uli Jon Roth to a level that was almost unimaginable before. But it’s not just in the solos that we see this classical influence as Yngwie has implemented it across the board in the song structures & instrumentation. The overall result sounds very much like a balanced combination of classical music & traditional heavy metal with a couple of songs leaning more towards hard rock, several hinting at the influence of jazz-fusion masters Allan Holdsworth & Al Di Meola & one of the two vocal tracks “As Above, So Below” possessing a noticeably more epic metal sound that oozes of the later European power metal movement with Soto’s vocal histrionics reminding me a fair bit of Manowar’s Eric Adams.

I have to admit that even though I’m enamored with the technique on display, I can’t say that all of this material appeals to me. When the song structures are at their most classically influenced I find it all a bit too overblown to really become engaged with while there can be no question that the power metal track I just mentioned falls clearly outside of my comfort zone. But despite this, I can’t help but really enjoy the “Rising Force” album. I think it includes a few belter riffs which is not something I can always say of Yngwie’s more vocal & solo-driven later material. I also think we have some of his most interesting compositional work here. If you’re a guitar nut then this should be a no-brainer. This record literally created the guitar-shred instrumental album concept & still hasn’t been topped for sheer technical brilliance. But if you’re a little averse to egotistical show-ponyisms then I’d suggest that you steer well clear of it.