We’re living in a golden age of retro guitars – a period when you can barely turn around without tripping over some cool, vintage-styled plank. Granted, the retro fad has become a bit cliché. But who cares? An avalanche of rose-tinted guitars sure beats the pointy, heavy-metal binge of the ’80s or the bottomless pit [...]
Ibanez RGA-8 Price: $1,102.21 (approx. $800 street). Info: ibanez.com In the annals of cool, weird, and unusual guitars, they’re nothing like an eight-string axe. It’s a strange beastie, sporting a mammoth neck that begs for new fretting approaches. The trend that’s driving eight-string guitars onto the market are metal and shred players who are searching [...]
If you’ve been waiting for the future of jazz to arrive, this may well be it. The young trumpeter is creating a beguiling blend of post-bop, dark rock, and hip-hop – try to picture Miles Davis in Radiohead and you’ll be getting warmer. Better still, Christian Scott has a young, gifted band featuring guitarist Matthew [...]
Egnater Tweaker 40 Price: $1,149 (approx. $800 street). Info: egnater.com Egnater has just amplified its Tweaker line with a new 40-watt, two channel, 1×12 combo. This amp has a Celestion Elite GH-50 speaker in a half-closed, birch-plywood cabinet and weighs a portly 53 pounds – though as many tube enthusiasts know, more weight often adds [...]
BTO holds an interesting spot in rock history, in essence serving as hard rock’s ambassadors to AM pop radio. Their reign was brief, but from 1973 to ’76, music fans could barely turn around without tripping over another catchy BTO hit, most of which are collected here. You probably already know the story – the [...]
Only the most jaded rock fan can resist pumping their fist to the hardrockin’ nirvana of Scorpions. Long past their heyday, the German rock institution has decided to cap their career with a final album that includes their favorite covers plus re-recordings of some Scorps classics. Led by one of metal’s greatest vocalists, Klaus Meine [...]
Throughout 10 pummeling tracks, the Portland, Oregon-based Red Fang demonstrates everything that is right with heavy metal today, displaying an excellent array of influences, from Black Sabbath to Alice In Chains to Metallica. The resulting metal can be safely filed under the sub-genre of “stoner metal,” alluding to the sound Sabbath made famous 40 years [...]
The year 1971 marked one of those seismic shifts in rock and roll, when critical LPs by the Who, Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, Yes, and others blew away ’60s psychedelia and established a new paradigm based on melody, muscle and, frequently, grand conceptual themes. Right up there was Jethro Tull, who released Aqualung that [...]
ESP LTD Viper 256P Price: $399 (street) Info: espguitars.com. In the protoplasmic days of heavy metal, Tony Iommi slashed away at classics like “War Pigs” and “Iron Man” with a ’65 SG Special, creating a look, sound, and vibe that has lasted decades. Today, this earth-crunching tone is echoed in the ESP LTD Viper 256P, [...]
These two Thin Lizzy albums were originally released in 1976 and set the stage for the band’s astonishing run of hardrock masterpieces through the rest of the decade. Jailbreak contained Lizzy’s mega-hit “The Boys are Back in Town,” but sadly, the LP was so poorly mixed that guitarist Scott Gorham once told me it “…sounded [...]
