![]() The songs here are mostly good ‘n heavy, and the guitar playing is positively staggering. This album, called Victims of the Future, represents Gary at his rock/metal guitar hero peak. And while Corridors certainly had its metal moments, Gary decided that his follow up to Corridors would be heavier, and angrier. In 83, the musical direction of the day was getting more metal. He was becoming a superstar in Europe and Japan, but outside of guitarists, he remained totally unknown in the clueless United States. It contains the best heavy stock Strat tone I’ve ever heard. His 1982 album Corridors of Power was a stunning release with a nice balance of power-pop and heavy rock songs. Despite his best efforts to hook up with a lead singer he could get some millage out of, no one stuck and Moore decided that he had to bite the bullet and front the band himself. It’s 1983 and after a few years of false starts, Gary has finally got his solo band on track. We’re going to go back to when Gary Moore was to my ears, the best guitar player on the planet. I listen to him now and hear none of the player he was in the era of this album.īut enough of that. Sadly, Gary the rocker got tamer with each subsequent effort. When he made his initial jump to blues, his playing had all the fire and intensity his rock playing was known for at the time. As a solo artist, he wrote pop songs to complement the heavy rockers. He developed amazing speed playing chops-intensive fusion with Colosseum II. He honed his rock style through his years with Thin Lizzy. ![]() He would go rude with heavy handed bends and pinched harmonics, or he could go subtle with delicate playing volume swells and soaring melodies. Most important to his style, I feel, was the pure BALLS and kick-ass attitude that came through in his phrasing. Gary Moore trademarks included palm-muted flurries on the low strings, huge, screaming bends, rapid-fire open-string pull-offs, fast, repetitive, major-7th arpeggios moved chromatically that can sound like tapping - but are not, and assorted whammy bar effects. His style was a combination of Jeff Beck-on-speed, plus a dash of Peter Green, but mostly it was his own. On live albums, he would stretch out the solo’s original thematic ideas and play some of the most amazing shit you’ve ever heard - and he never seemed to run out of ideas. On his studio albums, his solos were composed stories within the song, and typically start slow and build to a crescendo. He wasn’t a particularly schooled player - certainly not a theory guy, but what Moore’s playing always had was tons of feel behind it. His guitar sound form this era literally SCREAMS.Īs a player, he was blazingly fast, but unlike a lot of shredders, he’d usually set up the speed with slow melodic playing, and always made sure the speed said something. Gary said that he liked the guitar sound to be “just on the verge of being out of control.” That’s a very good description of it. You can hear the pick attack on the strings. Whether he was using a stock Strat or a stock Les Paul - he was equally at home on both - Moore had tone you’d kill for: It was primarily a pure guitar wood + Marshall tone - not buzzy or gainy but smooth and thick (heavy gage strings helped). It had fire, passion, intensity, emotion, great gobs of attitude, melody, and a wide array of dynamics from bombastic to subtle. Moore’s playing at this time combined everything you could possibly ever want or ask for from a guitar hero. In those old interviews, it was Gary’s name that was most frequently mentioned by all the popular players of the day (both young and old) as a guy they listened to and admired. I often go back and read old issues of Guitar Player, Guitar World, Guitar for the Practicing Musician, etc. While the non-musician public thought Van Halen was the be-all end-all, and guitarists were having Yngwie rammed down our throats, Gary Moore was the guitar player’s guitarist. If you lived through the 80s as a rock guitar player, you knew this (didn’t you?). And for a good ten years there, he was the baddest motherfucker around. Back in the 80s, when excess was IN, Gary Moore was quite content to be himself, and indulge in being a rock/metal Guitar Hero. He wasn’t always doing a Clapton/Peter Green trip (see After Hours, BBM, Blues For Greeny) Nope. He wasn’t always floundering through bizarre pop directions (see Dark Days in Paradise, and A Different Beat). Gary Moore wasn’t always the weenie bluesman he is today recycling the same, tired old blues licks album after album.
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