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"Conquer & Divide" Review Featured In Quintessence, March, 2003
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Joe Stump`s Reign Of Terror
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Review of "Conquer & Divide"
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By: Wayne Klinger
he follow-up to "Sacred Ground" is an emphatic chapter in Progressive/Guitar-oriented Metal with an impressive "who's who" line-up of Joe Stump, Mike Viscera, Matt Scurfield and Jay Rigney with special keyboard guest on here Mats Olausson. Reign Of Terror mixes the best elements of Dio, Rainbow and Malmsteen on this 10-track CD. Yeah, it's Neo-Classical and orchestrated with well-written songs and is very redundant in a sense if you're tired of all the Impelliterri's, MacAlpine's, Bellas' and Mattsson's but I really like this CD myself and I have to say..Malmsteen is my all-time favorite guitarist and I was disappointed with his last couple albums, the songs sucked and he's more and more pulling away from the high quality instrumental pieces like he used to do ("Seventh Sign", "Fire & Ice" all the way back to the debut and Steeler stuff). Reign of Terror captures that lost chemistry I remember so well and the only thing I can blame is all the personnel changes Yngwie had (his biggest assets were Jeff Scott Soto and the Johansson brothers as well as Mark Boals; it went downhill from there to be quite frank).
The catchiest thing I like about Stump is he has some great riffs and rhythms in his songs; some really chunky, heavy, cement-mixer stuff here and he plays just as well as Yngwie (I'm sure everyone knows that by now) and has many hooks in these songs; definately 5 times better than "Sacred Ground" despite I liked that release too but not like this one...kudos!
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Wayne Klinger / Quintessence
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