Well, I guess many know Vinnie Moore already. And this album is for sure the typical guitar hero stuff, nice melodies and quite well played guitar moments, but like for most of them, is there more into it ? Is Vinnie Moore going to stand out of the crowd like my beloved Satriani, Rondat or lately Anand ?

The tunes are quite different one from another, where Defying Gravity (the first track) would bore me with it's technical ways à la Yngwie, a track like Out And Beyond will please me with his simple yet very enjoyable melody. The song Last Road Home is somewhat interesting, very simple and sounding quite acoustic yet a nice tune. Alexander The Great is also quite nice, with interesting transitions and an overall good and epic feeling getting out of it. The album goes on and on demonstrating the skills of this guitar player. I believe the overall lack cohesion as all tunes are very different, tunes separately are quite okay if most of them are a bit "easy" and not entertaining enough, after all you must be more than a great guitar player to replace the vocals on a song, and only a few one are good enough to my opinion to really let their guitar takes the full position as singer. And although Vinnie can make his guitar sing, I believe that is music still miss something. Some cool songs like Equinox with it's definite Spanish touch will entertain enough it's taken out of context, but like I said the overall is maybe sounding too much of a melpot to show off the player's abilities to play different style and nobody will deny it that's for sure.

A nice guitar hero album, if you're craving for those then you can pick it up quickly cause it's a fairly good one and one that is furthermore on the melodic side, but I wouldn't get up at night and pick up this one if any instrumental urge stroke me. A good Satriani album does the job better.