I think Yngwie Malmsteen is interesting. He’s got a lot albums….Ive been listening to him at work with my iPhone in shirt pocket….

What are some of your guy’s favorite Yngwie Malmsteen albums?

Marching Out is my favorite by far. I'll take that over any Ozzy album.

Fire & Ice is my favorite, followed by Eclipse. The rest I'm not too bothered about, but those two are very well done imo.

Best right hand in the business, and more emotion in his playing than most give him credit for. One of the more interesting shredders, but still not on the level of EVH, Vai, Gilbert...

I like all their albums up to War to End All Wars, including this one.
My favorite, though, by a long shot, is Marching Out. Rock solid album.

I like a dozen or so of his songs, but the song "Rising Force" is a pure classic.

I bounce back and forth between the debut and Marching Out as far as my all time favorite, but honestly anything he put out through Alchemy is awesome, and most of the stuff after that is decent though the production quality fluctuates pretty massively from one album to the next. His instrumentals up until Fire & Ice are also extremely distinctive, whereas the stuff he started shelling out on Fire & Ice without any singing tends to run together as he tends to shred almost the whole way through and only occasionally roles out anything resembling a melodic hook.

Probably my favorite Neo-classical shredder of all time, though I think there were other guitarists from the 80s like George Lynch and Craig Goldy that were a little better at mixing in melodic and motivic ideas along with the technical stuff.

"Marching Out" is his best, and he's never topped it in my opinion. That was one of my all-time favorite albums as a kid; every single song on that thing is epic. Although I enjoy "Trilogy" to a lesser extent, and "Oddessey" is good, but definitely more commercial. Other stuff- hit or miss, maybe half great songs,the rest, too much mindless shredding- but yet even the mindless shred stuff, I still like it.

Roughly in order of preference.

Marching Out - nothing to add here.
Magnum Opus - awesome 90's Mark Vescera album!
Rising Force - the best instrumentals ever written.
Trial by Fire: Live in Leningrad - do not overlook!
Facing the Animal - his most modern sounding with Mats Leven.
Perpetual Flame - Almost feels like a return to Marching Out, nice job from Ripper Owens.
Trilogy - very keyboardy, commercial and gothic at the same time.
Odyssey - same as above but more keyboardy than gothic,
Seventh Sign - Another killer with Vescera.
Fire & Ice - good but I don't think he utilized Goran Edmund to his full potential.

To be honest I've only ever really listened to Rising Force, but that's a great album for sure.

First four really.

Everything through Eclipse is mandatory. “Odyssey” is a remarkable collection of radio friendly tunes mixed with typical Yngwie heavy bangers. The live album is fantastic.

“Fire and Ice” has good moments but is laden with filler.

Then, he rebounds with the next three which are quite strong with “Facing the Animal” being my fav of this bunch.

Everything after this has ranged from “ok but repetitive” to cringey (particularly the two with Ripper Owens in one of the most egregious examples of a mismatched lineup in Metal history).

For a long time I would have said my favourite was Marching Out, but I think it's hard to deny just how insanely catchy Odyssey is. Everything he did through about The Seventh Sign is exceptional, and the stuff after isn't too bad either.

Malmsteen has probably the most misunderstood career by people who don't listen to him, and he feeds into it nowadays, but he has an outstanding catalogue of songs that stand up there with anything any metal artist has done.

There was a comment above about his right hand, and I'll just echo that watching him live makes it clear that he is probably the most effortless guitar player you'll ever see. It's probably because he has stayed in a more comfortable pocket than a lot of the other shredders, but he looks like he isn't even trying and he nails everything he plays.

He's also employed some of the best vocalists in the genre's history.

This is a remarkable roster (albeit one that's too big). His revolving door of vocalists probably stalled momentum.

Jeff Scott Soto
Joe Lynn Turner
Jorn Lande
Mark Boals
Goran Edman
Mike Vescera
Mats Levens
Doogie White

Yngwie's interview with Rick Beato on YouTube is a great watch for fans who want to see him in an excellent relaxed interview.

I'm only a greatest hits type fan to be honest, but I can't say I every did a dive into his stuff. I should probably rectify that. He is an amazing player to be sure.

Absolutely love all of the 1980s stuff, and the 89 Live in Leningrad recording is INSANE, one of my favorites from the entire shred movement- stunning, smoking performances of some of Yngwie's best material. The album he did with Alcatrazz fucking rules too.

I used to listen to Yngwie all the time. The first 5 albums were some of my favorites as a teenager and I also enjoyed a few cuts from The Seventh Sign, Magnum Opus and Facing the Animal. That orchestral album he did was also really enjoyable - albeit very OTT. I haven't actually heard a Yngwie album in full for a couple years and some of the deep cuts I've heard from them haven't aged super well. Most of the stuff he produced after 98' or so is pretty forgettable from what I'm told.

My favourite album of his is easily Trilogy.

Oh wow, I love Ripper with Yngwie, I feel like this is what Alchemy and War to End all Wars should have been. They recaptured that early atmosphere here.

I am glad HighwayCorsair mentioned Alcatrazz No Parole from Rock N Roll. That may be his best album and it is one of Graham Bonnet's top performances as well.

Not characteristic of Malmsteen but the Steeler album he did with Ron Keel on vocals is also pretty cool too.

Agreed 100%. Back in the late 90s I had a friend and fellow guitar player who was dead set in his opinion that Malmsteen was a pretentious showoff who never penned a single memorable melody, despite having never heard any of his material (he's a huge fan of Joe Satriani and Eddie Van Halen so he wasn't averse to complex stuff). After convincing him to listen to "Black Star" and "Icarus' Dream Suite Op. 4" off the self-titled debut, he had an instant change of heart, and proceeded to fall in love with the entirety of Odyssey once he got to hear some of his accessible anthems.

One thing I've noted over the years is that Yngwie's primary flaw is that he doesn't really have a filter when doing interviews, you ask him a question and he'll answer it in the most blunt fashion possible. Most of the time the press would take advantage of this, especially during the 90s when the musical landscape was changing, and goad him into saying stuff that feeds into this elitist impression that everyone has of him.



Yeah, Beato gets flack for gushing over his guests, but I honestly like his interviewing style because of it. That was one of Yngwie's best interviews entirely because Rick was actually interested in getting his story and his input on how to approach the instrument, ergo there was no stupid tabloid crap.

I think it's symptomatic of a broader public opinion that fast guitar playing is bad. If you pop into any discussion about unpopular guitar opinions, half of the opinions are saying how they'd rather listen to something with "feel" or "emotion" rather than something like Malmsteen. Ignoring the fact that those are somewhat undefinable terms, I can't help but feel that enjoying shredding is the truly unpopular opinion nowadays. Metal fans don't mind it as much, because a lot of metal is extremely fast to begin with, but it's pretty hard to find people that like 80s-styled shredding. And truthfully, Malmsteen, while one of the better guitar players in the scene, was nowhere near as egregious with his shredding as stuff like Cacophony, or really anything on Shrapnel records.

You're right. It's just a holdover from hipsters who hated technical rock music, the same people who bitch about metal guitarists playing "without feel, man!" are the same people who worship jazz which often consists of highly technical soloing. I don't even particularly like Yngwie's music but this attitude is so dumb.

Yeah, unless there is a good reason I'm not interested in being combative in an interview or trying to focus on the bullshit rather than his music and how he makes and approaches it. I don't need him to ask about "the fooking fury" or such shit.

Oh yeah, I get royally annoyed by that stupid "feel/emotion" canard, mostly because random people will pop into the YouTube comments of an Yngwie video and just spout that crap. If you ask me, both "Black Star" and "Icarus' Dream Suite" have loads of feel and emotion in them, not to mention passages that are pretty easy to hum along with. Half of these clowns are Dave Gilmore fan boys who think that everyone should just meander through a blues scale as slowly as possible in order to be playing a proper solo. And agreed, if I were to put Yngwie's music (especially his seminal 80s material) up against a lot of the stuff put out by Michael Angelo Batio or about half of the 2000s roster of Lion Music, Yngwie would be middle of the road in terms just how many notes are thrown into a given song.



You'll generally find that these hipster types have a complete aversion to metal music in general. One thing I will say about Yngwie's playing style, it's far more aggressive and heavy than what usually passes for indie rock. The thing that annoys me about these people isn't so much that they have this viewpoint, but that they insist on invading spaces on YouTube and others social media to lecture others about it. I don't often see metal heads going onto jazz jam videos and pulling similar crap.



Not to mention that stuff has already been discussed to death. One thing that rarely gets brought up about that "unleashed the fury" incident, for example, is the fact that it happened soon after Yngwie had dealt with a lot of personal setbacks, including his mother's death. Mix in a lot of alcohol and some flight attendant making the dumb decision to just dump a pitcher of ice water onto him while he's passed out, it's kind of hard to imagine anyone in that situation not having a meltdown. When I was 15 one of my brothers pulled a similar stunt with me after I'd passed into a food coma and I had thrown out multiple expletives as a reflex in earshot of my grandparents before realizing what I had done. lol

Yeah, he has plenty of feel in his guitar playing, and just in general. It's practically overflowing so not sure how people manage to miss it You can literally hear in his playing that he's an emotional guy; he puts everything he has into it.

I love a lot of "shredders". I listen to them as exceptional songwriters. Sure all the young ones indulged a bit in the speed but it was a period where the instrument was still evolving. Becker, Satriani, Friedman, Moore and of course Vai were all writing incredible songs with amazing solos.

Satriani especially is very accessible, Forgotten Part 2? Pure emotion.

Malmsteen is not only incredibly important (if not the most important along with EVH, I've argued that before!) for the evolution of the instrument in rock/metal, people tend to forget he is half responsible for european power metal ("Trilogy is half Tolkki's guitar playing"). His albums were emphatically METAL. Even when he went more Miami friendly he still had some great heavy/power stuff.

Facing the Animal and Inspiration (fantastic covers) are the last YM albums in my collection.

Speaking of Beato the Vai/Satriani interview is great. Very moving and I'm very interested in that collab.

There are people who can play fast and technical and yet still play with feeling, and Malmsteen, I believe is one of them. There is an undeniable passion there, which is hard to really define. I've heard a lot of neoclassical shredders over the years, the Dragonforce guys for example, that just don't quite have that. And this is with all due respect to them.

I have listened to Malmsteen for 20 years and have seen him live several times.

He can't write songs...or at least forgot to after the Doogie White period.

Odyssey is the best and JLT was the only tolerable singer he had.

Malmsteen's lingered on my list (more like a tome these days) of artists to investigate further for a very long time. I've only listened to "Trilogy" thus far and that's a good time.