From the off Hell Or High Water is a more disciplined record than some of Malmsteen’s recent outings. He reportedly generated somewhere in the region of 80 or 90 pieces of music while writing it, then ruthlessly selected what he considered the strongest material. The result is a deliberately compact nine-track album running about 46 minutes, constructed to work as an album rather than as nine conveniently downloadable guitar demonstrations.
That sense of architecture matters because Malmsteen has never suffered from an absence of ideas. If anything, the problem has historically been the opposite: the man has ideas arriving at his front door in battalions, and apparently nobody has the authority to tell them to wait outside.
“Now Or Never” is an ideal opener because it immediately establishes the rules: palm-muted riffing, baroque melodies, vocals, and solos executed at velocities normally associated with escaping a collapsing building. It is recognisably classic Malmsteen, but with enough songwriting focus to stop it becoming merely another exercise in demonstrating that his right hand has never encountered a speed limit.
Then comes “Am Caprice/Hell Or High Water”, the title-track instrumental and probably the album’s purest expression of the Malmsteen religion. This is where he dispenses with the minor inconvenience of singing and gets on with the business of turning the fretboard into a medieval weapons laboratory. It is fast, dramatic, flamboyant and completely uninterested in whether you think four minutes of guitar heroics is excessive.
“Antikythera” and “Beyond Zeta Reticuli” are the other major instrumental attractions. The titles sound as though Malmsteen has been spending his retirement designing either a spacecraft or a particularly aggressive brand of vitamin supplement, but musically they show his continuing fascination with instrumental composition rather than mere soloing. The latter stretches beyond six minutes, giving him plenty of room to indulge his classical vocabulary without having to pretend that a verse-chorus structure is the pinnacle of human civilisation.
The real surprise, however, may be “(On The) Battlefield”. It has one of the album’s strongest vocal performances and, crucially, a melodic character that recalls the more accessible side of Malmsteen’s earlier work. The keyboard presence helps give it some of that old-school grandeur, and the track has enough hooks to remind you that this man once understood the mysterious ancient art of writing an actual song.
“Eye For An Eye” is another winner, particularly because Malmsteen sounds increasingly comfortable with his own vocals. This remains the elephant in the room, of course. Yngwie singing is a bit like Yngwie driving a sensible family hatchback: theoretically possible, but you keep wondering why he isn’t doing something much more dangerous.
Yet his voice works considerably better here than the sceptics might expect.
And then there is “Father”, the closing instrumental tribute to Malmsteen’s late father. After all the velocity, swagger and musical peacocking, it is unexpectedly affecting. It also demonstrates something occasionally obscured by the blizzard of arpeggios: Malmsteen can still play with genuine emotional weight. He has always had the technique. The more interesting question has been whether he can make the technique mean something. On “Father”, he does.
2021’s Parabellum was the important precursor. Malmsteen has said that the pandemic disrupted the usual make-record/tour/write-record treadmill and allowed him to work in a more concentrated, uninterrupted fashion. He evidently liked the result. Hell Or High Water follows essentially the same philosophy, but sounds more polished and more selective.
The album’s instrumental and vocal tracks complement each other rather than simply competing for oxygen, and the sequencing gives the record a sense of momentum. That is one reason it feels stronger than several of the albums immediately preceding it.
It also helps that the production is clearer and the bass is more present, while Malmsteen’s vocals have apparently received more attention. Even sympathetic listeners have occasionally wondered whether his singing was an elaborate practical joke being played on the record-buying public. Here, at least, he sounds considerably more convincing.
Malmsteen’s historical position is secure. Rising Force didn’t merely produce a successful guitar album; it helped establish an entire vocabulary of neoclassical shredding. His influence runs through generations of technically obsessive players, from the late-’80s shred explosion to today’s technically outrageous metal guitarists. His name belongs in the same historical conversation as Hendrix, Page and Van Halen when discussing players who fundamentally altered what people believed the electric guitar could do.
But history has moved on.
There are now players with extraordinary precision, extended-range instruments, seven-, eight- and nine-string guitars, absurd rhythmic sophistication, electronic processing, polyphonic techniques and enough YouTube followers to populate a medium-sized republic. The modern guitar world is considerably broader than the universe Malmsteen helped create.
He remains almost comically identifiable. Give him five seconds of a recording and you know who it is. The harmonic minor scales, diminished arpeggios, dramatic vibrato, rapid alternate picking, classical sequences and sweeping runs are not merely techniques anymore. They are a dialect.
Hell Or High Water isn’t Rising Force. Nothing is. But it doesn’t need to be. It is a surprisingly cohesive, frequently thrilling late-period Malmsteen record that puts melody, composition and atmosphere back alongside the virtuosity.
And frankly, after four decades of this nonsense, it would be rude to ask him to calm down now.
Donnie’s Rating: 8.5/10
