Yngwie Malmsteen

This Man is God of his own style :) There's no one in the World like him!

Yngwie Malmsteen may look more like Mel Smith in a wig these days than the slim, athletic guitar god of his youth, but boy, can the man still play. Even if he's frankly a bit past the tight leathers-and-bare-chest routine, he's such a fine player that you'd forgive his little indulgences.

If you've not heard the justifiably-famous Swedish guitarist and composer yet, and you're at all into rock metal guitar, you could do a lot worse than pick up his latest album, "Relentless", which was released this month. It's classic Malmsteen, which means astonishing sleight of hand in the generally neo-classical mode that he once called 'baroque and roll'. He is often compared with the classical violinist and composer, Paganini, whose hallmark was the agility of his finger work, and I can see why (and of course, the comparison is encouraged by the man, or at least his agent). On the other hand, someone said of Paganini that he was "a phenomenon rather than a development", and I can see the comparison there, too.

Malmsteen helped found a distinctive style of guitar playing called "shredding" which is characterized by firing off arpeggios at fantastic speeds (and often in self-indulgent solos of fantastic length). Somewhere into the 80s, the genre began to lose popularity and it never really came back, making Malmsteen into something of a cult figure rather than a mainstream star. But he's still out there, playing in his distinctive Bach-inspired style, in the same leathers and bare chest, only he wears a Rolex these days and the pants are a few sizes larger than they used to be. And he's still rated as one of the top ten rock guitarists, ever, sharing the company of the likes of Joe Satriani and Steve Vai in the super-supergroup, G3. For a man of his sheer physical size, it's a wonder that his hands can move so fast; but he never seems to slow down and a couple of years ago, players of the x-box game "Guitar Hero" became able to win the "Malmsteen Award" if they could hit 1000 correct notes in succession.

Listening to the new album, the man seems to have got faster, if anything. I'm no music critic so I wouldn't attempt to analyze it, other than to say it's very much what you'd expect from a man who is without doubt one of the very fastest and most fluid rock guitar players of all time. If you want to hear how far a Stratocaster can be pushed in terms of notes per second, you'll love this. And you might also find some inspiration in knowing that the man is entirely self-taught, too.

For a player with such an energetic style, the website is curiously conservative and even a bit subdued, with rather lacklustre reviews filled with the expected stock phrases: "guitar legend", "signature virtuosity", 'blinding speed" and so forth, and frustratingly small photos. If you want to know about the man, you really need to listen to him play.