Review by Xephyr for Steve Vai - Inviolate (2022)

Ceaseless Regrowth

Steve Vai is an obvious, resounding name when it comes to guitarists given his immensely prolific resume, which is much too long and somewhat unimportant to even begin to detail for this look at Inviolate. Vai was one of the frontrunners of the 1980's guitar shredding scene where the world was awed at the prowess of certain guitarists that were pushing technical playing to its limits as new techniques were discovered and mastered. His playing and status inspired many, many guitarists across many, many genres despite is solo career albums feeling a little bit too of the era. Thirty years after the initial boom, I can't say that guitar virtuosos are revered in the same way, with most vocal critics dismissing fast playing as boring exhibitions of skill and proof of lacking songwriting skills. As someone who generally enjoys instrumental rock and metal guitar albums I can't entirely disagree with the lack of songwriting from the scene as a whole, but the more I dug into Inviolate the more I felt like this is an impressively special album for Vai.

After pouring more than 50 years of practicing, playing, and performing into his guitar career, it was only a matter of time before life decided to rear its ugly head towards the 60 year old. Two corrective surgeries for his shoulder and then his hand left him questioning his ability to continue to play, as he stated in interviews and other publications. It's saddening looking from the outside in on someone who has maybe reached the end of their road on something they dedicated so much of their life to, like seeing a professional athlete's final game and wonder what they'll fill that void with as their craft had become such a massive part of themselves. Thankfully for Vai, the recovery process was obstacle filled but manageable as he did what he could to continue to play and eventually found himself in a position to release another full length album. Inviolate is partly what you would expect a guitar-centric album to be, but Vai is able to give the listener more to chew on than just fast shredding or drawn out, similar sounding solos.

I found myself returning to Inviolate more often than I thought I would due to its catchy hooks and satisfying variety being a great backdrop for whatever I was doing. I was going to leave it at that, but stumbling upon the music video for the opening track "Teeth of the Hydra" pushed me down the rabbit hole of the backstory and quirks this album has. Any sane person would assume that the guitar shown on Inviolate's cover is just a prop, but it's one hundred percent real and was jaw-droppingly cool to see how "Teeth of the Hydra" was actually played. It may be gimmicky to some, but seeing Vai use this stupidly complicated hunk of metal to take care of all the string parts at once really elevates the song as there's a ton of neat melodies and cool tricks displayed on it. "Knappsack" is the other unique track as it was written and recorded when Vai was playing and writing with only his left hand as his right shoulder was healing from surgery. That music video performance is worth a watch as well since the creativity to write a one-handed piece like that is fascinating to me.

The rest of Inviolate is a mixed bag of sometimes metal and sometimes jazzy guitar shredding, ranging from the hard rocking "Zeus In Chains" or more sultry "Greenish Blues" with its more dissonant chords. Apparently Vai also showcases some impressive bending and finger picking technique on "Candle Power", but I'm too instrumentally illiterate to get overly excited about it. The softer and cleaner "Little Pretty" and closer "Sandman Cloud Mist" add the necessary variety to Inviolate and are nice to listen to in the moment, but are easily more forgettable than the rest of the offerings. "Avalancha" and "Apollo In Color" are more of what I'd expect from a Steve Vai solo album and round out the album with some impressive soloing and decent album progression. It's incredibly hard to make a guitar-centric album that will transcend the issues that inevitably come with the territory, and while I don't think that Vai has succeeded in that lofty goal, I think he's done a tremendous job of recording a set of tracks that deeply showcases himself as a guitar player this far into his career. At least to my ears Inviolate has a ton of character and feeling poured into both the slick and mellow as well as the hard rocking tracks, despite some being more captivating than others. It's a shame that albums like this are forcibly limited in scope just due to their nature, but the maturity and applied wisdom that Vai has at this stage in his playing has finally culminated in a creative and more passionate sounding full album than most guitar shredders.