*****Surfing with the Alien by Joe Satriani – Weep Techno Engineers, Satch Is Better than Machinery

If you are looking for a fan of Joe Satriani, I am not.  I like this Satch disk.  That is it.  Yes, it is true; I didn’t much care for his more recent work with Chicken Foot much too.  (Though I reviewed Chicken Foot first, I have been more familiar with Surfing with the Alien, since high school c. 1996, which I got after liking The Extremist.  However, I no longer like The Extremist).  I have never heard anything else of Satch’s, other than Surfing with the Alien that I liked or didn’t bore me.

I am positive that he is a phenomenal guitarist, but it is just that I never seem to like the music he solos over.  When Satch is king, he spoils the stew.  He usually sets it up so that he is the star, and the other instruments just support him.  He is a hog of the good music on his albums and usually I hate that, but this album despite being the guitar virtuoso at the center of attention, as if he is only person at the show is any good, this album is really good, really.  This is Joe’s best work so far as I know.  I do know a Satch fan who thinks Surfing with the Alien isn’t his swansong though, but as far as I know this is his best.

My favorite song on the album is track 4, “Always with Me, Always with You.”  Usually, I am not a fan of slow music, but this song is great.  Think Tears of Sahara if you are a Tony MacAlpine fan, oh yeah I forgot Tony MacAlpine has consistently put out better music than Satch, and suffers from obscurity.  This is a problem for many musicians, but I digress.  Track 4 is so lyrical, and Joe leaves nothing aside in the song that could hide his anything but perfect playing.  No computer techno beats could touch a song like this one.  It takes a human musician’s touch to make music like this.  You can’t program something as good as this for programming can’t account for the inflections of one’s touch on their instrument (provided that you are a good musician).

Just like a 5 star album should be, every track is awesome.  No second on Surfing with the Alien is wasted, start to finish, well almost, track 6, “Circles” is terrible.  That one almost got by me because my 100 disc shuffler usually never plays track 6 on any cds.  I have to wonder if the engineers where paranoid about the number 6.  666 the number of the beast or even the number 6 on its own sometimes creeps people out.  As I write my reviews, I usually have the disc in player while writing.  Oddly enough, at this point in the review track 6 came on, just as I was musing over how this disc is flawless.  Lol!  I have had this disc in the player for probably more than a year and never heard track 6 once, as usual, due to the weird engineering of whoever made my (actually, my wife’s) disc changer contraption.