Electric Fuzz

In the long standing tradition of instrumental shredders Joe Satriani, Steve Vai and Paul Gilbert; who write songs without words and compensate with extremely intricate guitar melodies, come the hard edged rock/metal stylistic wonders of Argentina born virtuoso Carina Alfie. Though her work on “Electric Fuzz” bears the most resemblance to Satriani’s recent practice of tailoring simple and accessible rock ideas, her lead playing style clearly emulates the wild and seemingly asymmetrical fits of passion that her self-admitted inspiration Vai is known for. Essentially you get the best of both worlds here in that you get something that lacks Satriani’s predictable though beautiful melodies, as well as the quirky avant-garde compositions that Vai has been known to turn out sporadically, most of which are difficult to grab onto.

The contents on here run through a variety of differing styles, all of which are held in common by Alfie’s unrelenting flurries of complex melodic passages and idiomatic shred sequences. You get some hard and heavy progressive metal to complement some Malmsteen neo-classical showmanship on the title track “Electric Fuzz”. People who are fans of Satriani’s melodic ballads over restful backdrops are sure to go for “Peaceful” and “Hadas”, both of which make frequent use of multiple leads for sparsely placed yet charming harmony passages. Even those who really love Steve Vai’s music for its outer space-like quality have a nice little progressive shred gem in “Magical Palace”, which is dedicated to the man himself no less.

One might guess at the metal credentials of someone whose influences mostly stem from hard rock musicians, but rest assured that this album definitely has a metal edge to it. For instance, the only song on here that actually possesses words “Run From Love” is actually about as heavy as it gets for someone who likes progressive metal with a heavy helping of epic doom mixed in. In fact, combining Jeff Lenhart’s high end vocals with the slow paced and dark riffs on here could make this a dead ringer for something off of a Solitude Aeternus album, although the keyboards pull it a little bit in a Dream Theater direction in terms of atmosphere. The closing song “Lucky Dog” also has a couple of solid heavy metal riffs that definitely show some Sabbath influences, although they’re played a little bit faster, played in somewhat of a Zakk Wylde fashion and have about 3 times as many lead notes thrown over top.

If you like fast guitars, you will definitely like this. Some say that there aren’t any women out there that can compete with the large population of men in the male dominated world of guitar shredding. Take one listen to this album and you will find yourself begging to differ. It might not be as dark as what Jeff Loomis just recently put out, and it might not be as ridiculously fast as Michael Angel Batio’s latest release, but this is a contender if I’ve ever heard one.

Later submitted to (www.metal-observer.com) on January 5th, 2009.