Search - Steve Vai :: Fire Garden

Too Weird & Unmemorable For Me

YJM | Somewhere In The South | 04/27/2008

(2 out of 5 stars)

"Okay, so I'll admit I'm far from a Steve Vai. I think the man lacks soul and passion, and much of his music sounds very mechanical. Most of his whammy bar work sounds like noise to me and gets very annoying after a while. The only exceptions are Passion & Warfare and Eat Em & Smile by David Lee Roth. Those two albums worked very well I feel, with none of the weird Steve Vai filler I can't stand.



Back to Fire Garden. First of all this album is divided into two halves, one being instrumental and the other vocal. Besides the song All About Eve the vocal tunes are totally unmemorable, with silly lyrics (Brother) to boot. Steve isn't the worst singer I've ever heard, but he's totally unremarkable in the role as well. Additionally the vocal tunes feature very short, unmemorable guitar solos, so for me there is no reason to listen to those songs. As I said, All About Eve is the exception, with a gorgeous, haunting melody and short but sweet guitar solo.



The instrumentals aren't bad, but no where near the quality of the stuff on Passion and Warfare. There's A Fire In The House kicks the album off with a lot of energy and is one of my favorite songs on the album. The Crying Game follows and it's okay. The song has some great outro soloing however. Dyin' Day is a beautiful song which kind of reminds me of All About Eve as they both have a beautiful, almost haunting quality to them. Blowfish, Hand on Heart, Bangkok, and Warm Regards do nothing for me. The latter featuring some kind of cheesy drum programming and synth work that gives the song a cheap feeling.



The following are total weird filler and I hate when Steve feels the need to include stuff like this: Whookam, The Mysterious Murder of Christian Tiera's Lover (could that be any more long winded?), Deepness, and When I Was a Little Boy.



I've saved the best for last, and that's the Fire Garden Suite. This is classic Steve Vai, and in my opinion the sole reason to purchase this album. Steve brings his compositional abilities to the fore on this song along with fantastic musicianship. The song has a very raw feel to it, unlike Passion and Warfare which was heavily effects driven, with multiple guitar tracks on each song. The Fire Garden Suite features very little of that, and even has some great acoustic guitar and sitar work. This is Steve Vai at his best, it's unfortunate more of the album didn't feature work like this.



So in summary, the songs I feel work are:



1. There's a Fire In The House

2. The Crying Game

3. Dyin Day

4. Fire Garden Suite

5. All About Eve



The rest of the album does nothing for me. I'm sure this review is going to piss off the die hard Steve Vai fans, but I'm sorry, I call em like I hear em. I can't give more than two stars for an album with 18 songs when I only like five of them. I would have bumped it up to two and half stars for the amazing Fire Garden Suite, but Amazon doesn't allow half star ratings. I'm sure true Steve Vai fans love the album as they probably have much more patience for the weird stuff as well as Steve's vocal experiments. If like me you're not a hardcore Steve Vai fan I recommend getting this one used for cheap, because it's definitely not for the casual listener."