**** Time Odyssey by Vinnie Moore – At the Guitar Virtuoso Level: Time Odyssey Is About Average

I can definitely recommend this album to someone who likes music like Jason Becker, Tony MacAlpine, Joe Satriani, James Murphy, Chris Poland, and the many others that put out albums where a soloing guitar player is central to the music.  This is the guitar virtuoso level, which is strangely a genre rather than an actual description.  This is because there are some folks who don’t play in the guitar virtuoso genre, that are guitar virtuosos nonetheless.  With the event of the earth’s population being in the billions, good guitarists grow on trees, and virtuosos are common enough.

I like this album.  I’d give every track on it a chance if you buy it.  You will probably like all of the tracks.  I know I did.  However, what I do have to say is that if you enjoy this genre, the guitar virtuoso genre, then Time Odyssey is only an average entry.  It is certainly not a bad album.  At this level, I’d rate an album that was a fizzle three, ***, stars, while I would rate a favorite five, *****, stars.

Pop music in my opinion generally ranges from 1 star to 3 stars.  I know that I drew a lot of angry comments from Smashing Pumpkins when I rated Melancholy and the Infinite Sadness only 3 stars.  Really, who thinks melancholy is all that great?  Lol!  Then, when I felt people were becoming over critical of my 3 star rating, I reduced it to 2 stars, the exact opposite direction.  That is when they really started to get angry, and millions of reviewers became rated higher than me.  Despite my lack of popularity, I was proud of myself for making my point provocative enough that people cared about it, even if it was only to try to demolish my point of view in favorite of the bitters of melancholy.

I pointed out that I don’t give starred ratings to music that I think has no redeeming qualities, which also seemed like Greek to those folks.  That’s right!  With me you have to earn every star you get!  Time Odyssey earned 4 out of a possible 5.  Therefore, Time Odyssey is a damn good album, that is definitely worth buying, and really what I mean by not giving it that 5^th star is that 100 years from now, I don’t believe people will still be seeking this album out for purchase anymore than they are now.

Like a Vincent van Gogh painting, I tend to reserve 5 star ratings for albums that might get remembered after the death of the artist, especially an artist who isn’t very popular in his or her lifetime, in the same way that generally folks ran as far as they could get when it came to Vincent van Gogh in his lifetime.  I have to admit, that does seem unfortunate, especially when you can probably figure that The Who will be remember 100 years from now, but would only draw 3 or 2 stars from me on most of their albums.

If the guitar virtuoso genre isn’t your thing, Time Odyssey may be easily overlooked, perhaps in favor of jazz album, or a good jam band album.  Whatever suits your taste, even if it be wasting away again in margarita ville .