Philip Sayce’s Peace Machine album was featured as a staff favourite on iTunes and I loved the sound of the 30 second excerpts so wandered off to the usual haunts like Amazon to try and buy the CD, only to discover that at the time I couldn’t buy it cheap, it was commanding quite a high price everywhere I looked.  So I bought it on iTunes, and stuck my brief review on there.  But I thought I would take the opportunity to speak in a little more depth on mymp3s.co.uk because hell, I’m in charge around here.

Philip Sayce is a great guitarist.  He sounds utterly free, playing with the sort of abandon that makes him a joy to listen to.  And when he throws himself down the stairs (to paraphrase Eddie Van Halen) he lands on his feet, he doesn’t put a note wrong.  This capability gives him the stature of a really great guitarist.

Personally I’ve always felt that the controls on amplifiers are designed to be turned all the way up to ten, so if you turn them all up full you’re going to get the best sound out of an amp.  I realise this makes me sound a little Spinal Tappish.   Philip Sayce sounds like he comes from that sort of school of thought (I don’t mean he sounds like Spinal Tap, I mean in terms of cranking your amp up).  It’s not a complicated sound, it’s a loud and wild sound he produces.

So on the first track on the Peace Machine album One Foot In The Grave everything gets off to a flying start, with guitar reminiscent of Stevie Ray Vaughan and Jimi Hendrix.

But it’s the guitar solo that really blows me away on this track.  It sounds like it’s just cranked right up loud to the brink of breaking up, and he plays with skilled abandon.  It’s one of my favourite solos ever, because it just shows what you can do within a relatively simple song if you know how to play.

I’ve now got a few more albums on my must-listen-to list, I’ve just got to lay my hands on them - his first album Philip Sayce Group, and Melissa Etheridge’s albums that feature his work from 2003 and 2004.

I guess I’m very late getting into Zakk Wylde’s band Black Label Society, but I just got three of their albums, Sonic Brew, Shot to Hell and Mafia.

I saw a video of Zakk Wylde ages ago on a Guitarist magazine cover disc and was deeply impressed with his skill.

Then a few months ago I was searching on the iTunes store and came across the Zakk Wylde track Code 19 on the Carmine Appice album Ultimate Guitar Zeus.  This track pootles along fine until the first guitar part comes wailing in.  Without getting too over the top about it, the guitar playing on Code 19 is utterly awesome, my idea of the perfect guitar part.

So for me it all started there, I downloaded a couple more Black Label Society tracks from iTunes but there comes a time when you just need to go out and buy complete CD’s.

One of the things I wanted to do on mymp3s.co.uk was to focus on particular tracks, not just talk about everything an artist does, or complete albums.

And the Black Label Society track Suicide Messiah from their 2005 album Mafia is the track I’m focusing on here.

I don’t know how deliberate it is, but Zakk  Wylde has played in Ozzy Osbourne’s band, and this particular track sounds to me like it was inspired by the Black Sabbath album Never Say Die! (their exclamation mark, not mine).  There is a particular sound and mood on that Sabbath album that I’ve always liked - kind of urban desolate.  Maybe my sense of recognition is something to do with Wylde’s voice, which sounds like the guy from ZZ Top trying to de-skin a plum in his mouth as he sings, but somehow recalls the sound of Ozzy’s voice.

So that particular sound and mood from Never Say Die is taken into other dimensions on this track.  Firstly it is devastatingly heavy.  Turn your MP3 player up full and you feel you could still tweak a few more decibels out of it and it would sound even better.  So if you can pump it through a decent stereo system, go for it!

Next, it’s got some guitar soloing on it, and that’s good news for me. It has become unfashionable for metal bands to have guitar solos, which I think is a real pity.  On this particular song Wylde demonstrates his particular skill for epic vibrato (although I think the sound he achieves on Code 19 is the ultimate example).

Fortunately on this track there aren’t too many pinched harmonics which generally I consider to be an OK sound but Wylde tends to throw them into tracks like sprinkling salt into a vat of McDonalds French Fries.

Something else about this track is that it doesn’t put a foot wrong.  That hardly sounds like an amazing compliment, but actually there are a lot of songs out there that aren’t perfect from beginning to end, you know, tracks where you just can’t bear to play them after a while.

Next in the list of reasons why I particularly like Suicide Messiah is that it sounds like the sort of song that anyone could write.  In reality this is an illusion because the fact is there are very few people that can write a simple song that is actually good.  Especially one that is this good.  But it has the benefit of making you feel there is hope yet, one day you too could come up with an awesome song that would be worthy of public attention.

And because it’s a simple song it doesn’t fall into that old heavy metal trap (think early Metallica or heaven forbid Yngwie Malmsteen) where it has a dozen different phases within the song, a zillion notes, and sounds like too much time was spent writing and practicing it.

Finally I’ll mention the feedback that cuts in about 30 seconds from the beginning of the track.  I love feedback, and this is a particularly good dose - I could listen to it forever…

The band members on the Mafia album were Zakk Wylde (Acoustic Guitar, Bass, Guitar, Piano, Vocals, Talk Box, Artwork, Voice Box, Mini Moog), Nick “ET” Catanese (Guitar, Group Member (when the band plays live), Barry Conley (Buchla Synthesizer, Mini Moog, Piano, OutofControl-atron), James LoMenzo (Bass, Vocals), Eddie Mapp (Mini Moog) and Craig Nunenmacher (Drums, Shaker).

We’ve had this on constant repeat in the car for the last month, ever since I introduced my 10 and 12 year old sons to the joys of Monty Python. It’s going to be getting even more play for the next few weeks now that we’ve booked seats at the theatre to see it performed in Spamalot - we go tomorrow and the tension is high!

You’d expect us to tire of it after a while but actually you get to hear another funny dimension in their verbal delivery every time you play it, and something about Monty Python lends itself to repetition, it’s so clever and funny.

Our most recent discovery, which made my 10 year old son fall about laughing, was when he noticed that when Sir Robin’s minstrel is singing his song, just at the point when Sir Robin cuts him short he says a rude word.

Another line that I could carry on listening to forever is when Michael Palin says “…we are now NO LONGER the knights who say ni!”.

What I would really like would be for The Album Of The Soundtrack Of The Trailer Of The Film Of Monty Python And The Holy Grail to be reissued on CD with more of the scenes still intact. It was originally cut short because it needed to fit onto a record, but now CD’s have been invented they could at least add The Tale of Sir Galahad back in.