YNGWIE MALMSTEEN - Attack!! Then attack again.
by Martin Popoff

Fretfire flasher Yngwie Malmsteen has finally seen his blazing Attack!! album released in America, surprisingly on major label Sony, no less. To my mind, that fact, the rise of Zakk, and the attendance success of G3 (of which Yngwie was a boisterous, crucial part), demonstrates that the guitar hero that perseveres, will receive his just reward, that the shredder who laughs last, laughs best.

Yngwie is indeed (and don't worry, only figuratively) on fire - prolific and, well... on Attack!!, the epitome of spontaneous. "There are a few things that are really big differences," begins the six-stringed workaholic. "The way it was recorded, the way it was written. Alchemy was sort of a concept album; I had a concept going through there. I just wanted to do the most extreme metal and heaviest metal is possible. And then with War To End All Wars, my intention was to make a really dark album, really heavy; so I had a concept going in. Whereas with this album, the only concept I had, was that there was no concept. Also the way I wrote the album... I wrote it differently. The last 12 or 15 years or so, I've always been sitting in the room with the keyboard player and a drum programmer and so forth. In this particular case, I wrote everything, just by myself. I mean, I wrote everything by myself before too, but what I'm saying is that I was alone in the room. And the things that came out were instant. And I wrote the lyrics for things like Stronghold, right on the spot, whereas normally I never do that. Normally I create the structure for the song, then come up with the words later. But this time I tied them together as one thing. The most interesting thing was that I didn't do demos, and gave those to the band, and then we went into the rehearsal room and recorded, which is the normal way. I didn't show them anything (laughs). So when Patrick the drummer came in, he never even heard the songs; he never even heard one song. So I said, 'Today, we're going to play this song.' And I had the structure, a sort of demo, but not really a demo; Rise Up, for instance, the riffs and stuff. So I just put a click track down, and then I put a scratch guitar on it, and sort of arranged it on the spot; I put it together on the spot, so it's new to me as well. And then Patrick put drums on it. And then we did all the songs like that. And then I took those tapes to my other studio - I have two studios - and I brought the singer (ed. Dougie White - ex-Rainbow) in (laughs)."

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