This could be the most pointless review ever written.

Rabid Yngwie fans will no doubt agree. But for the rest of you, I will explain.

Yngwie is Yngwie. An no amount of words with stop Yngwie being Yngwie. So why bother?

Yngwie is a one man show – he does everything himself. He takes no advice, believes his own self-written press releases, has an ego the size of the empty Marshall stacks he ridiculously piles up on stage and is basically a self-declared shred icon.

So, any review of an Yngwie album that doesn’t tug on the girth of his titanic ego will be met with derision. I’ve read a couple of good reviews for this album, which makes me wonder if the audio for those was heard via a shortwave radio transmission to the mountains of Uzbekistan, as there is no sane rationale for anyone to hear this and not think that it sounds like a big sonic turd.

The drum sound alone is worthy of instant rejection by normally functioning ears. It sounds like they lowered a kit into a medieval mud-filled well and recorded whatever was able to be played with a RadioShack microphone from the top.

Yngwie’s vocals are as warm as a used tray of kitty litter and the shredding is so intent on the one purpose of million-degree shredding, that the album cover itself began to melt.

In his desire to be seen as a faultless guitar-bass-drum-vocal-production-mixer-engineer-cello-everything-god, he makes the same mistake for the forth album in a row. There is no self-awareness in play here. Yngwie can play – I have every album from his first decade – but he can’t and shouldn’t do it all.

Hire a producer, hire a drummer, hire a bassist, hire a vocalist, hire ANYONE that will actually work with you. And work together on something that doesn’t sound like it was recorded by a self-obsessed raving lunatic.

Like I said. It’s all pointless. Almost like the score for this album.