This is Yngwie's best album and it features his best vocalist ever Joe Lynn Turner. Yngwie combines Neo Classical Metal, Hair Metal and Power Metal to make his best album ever!

The collaboration of Joe Lynn Turner and Yngwie Malmsteen make this album a classic in my book. The songs are perfectly crafted, which says a lot for an artist who is known as a guitar virtuoso, but a mediocre songwriter. In fact, this is the only album by Yngwie Malmsteen where the songs are equal in appeal to his guitar mastery.

Every song on Odyssey is a masterpiece. Even the slow, thoughtful songs still sound "heavy" enough, but the music is emotionally moving at the same time. And Joe Lynn Turner is at his best on this album, hook-laden melodic rock tunes that need to be heard

TAB GUITARS INCLUDED!

With Eddie Van Halen and Randy Rhoads captivating millions with their Neo-Classical Guitar style and insane "shredding" abilities, these guys built the ground-work for master guitarist Yngwie Malmsteen. Malmsteen's fourth album, "Odyssey", he decided to take the band in a more commercial and melodic approach, while all the time keeping the breathtaking guitar flourishes and Power Metal that defined his first albums.

First of all this might have been seen as "selling out" by making this album a commercial type of album. Yngwie recruited vocalist extraordinaire, Joe Lynn Turner, to perform on "Odyssey." Joe Lynn also wrote all the lyrics for the 1988 effort, and the result was like magic. The two complimented each other perfectly, and together they created an album that outshines all others. The highlights were the ballads, Joe Lynn has a gorgeous voice and he was the best vocalist the Malmsteen had hired out of all the albums that he had created. Yngwie's guitar rips your heart out, and Joe Lynn's vocals tear it apart. When he sings Dreamin' (Tell Me) it is so beautiful that it still the heart. The lyrics only add to the sorrow with verses like "dreaming visions of you, feeling the love I never knew" and another favorite is "here we are on the crossroads of forever, shining star lights the way, walk with me on the winds of time, love's mystery is for us to find." And the guitar music in this one blends with the music wonderfully. Its not too loud, it allows Turner to really get to you with his soaring vocals, but its there, a sweet, harp-like acoustic in the background, and then during the solo it switches to a bubbling electric, that fits the mood of the song. Hold On is another classic ballad from this album, and in some ways is even more heartbreaking than Dreamin'. The opening guitar riff is an attention grabber, and makes the heart skip a beat when it starts up, its so beautiful. Hold On has a bluesy type feel to it, and the vocals are lush and beautiful, only Turner could perform them like this. There are some rockers on "Odyssey" too, like the thundering Rising Force which has another great verse in it "the lightning strikes cracking the night, it feels like never before, thunder and sparks in the Heart of the Dark, I hear a rising force". There is also an off-with-their-heads gothic metal song, that leaves you missing the days when Ronnie James Dio would sing songs about witches,demons, dragons, and magic spells, in Rainbow, Sabbath, and Dio. The song is called Riot In the Dungeons and is really killer, the necromancer rips on this one. Another album hot spot is Deja Vu.

Overall, "Odyssey" was wonderful, there was no way Yngwie could ever top this, especially since Turner left to join Deep Purple, so Yng was forced to find another singer. Swedish born, Goran Edman came in to fill in the spot

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