RUSTY COOLEY (E)

Guitarist Rusty Cooley is mainly an autodidact. In 1996 he laid his hands on a seven-string guitar and he hasn't been playing anything else since then. He’s a guitar teacher nowadays and meanwhile he composes his music not only for solo stuff, but also for his band called Outworld. His debut album features ten instrumental tracks, two of them being added as bonustracks with the vocals by Outworld-singer Kelly Carpenter, whose voice belongs to the same category as those of Marc Boals or Michael Vescera. I would have liked the production, by Cooley himself, less thin. In my opinion this album would have sounded much better if he had hired the likes of Lars Eric Mattsson or Sascha Paeth. Cooley states that his main influences are Yngwie Malmsteen, Paganini, Randy Rhoads and Jason Becker just to name a few. So you should by now have a good idea what this album sounds like. But the vigorously played seven-string goes even further over the top then the names mentioned above do or did. The melody lines are generally quite simple and straightforward, but the ‘never-ending super high tech’ raging and racing up and down the Jackson guitarneck goes on and on, the only positive exception is the first part of Dark Matter. I doubt if there are guitarist playing faster than Rusty Cooley, but I know for sure that I prefer less speed and more melody. If you're a real guitar freak this is definitely an album you should buy, if not, and you like variation, melody and beauty more than technique, skills and speed, well you’d better listen first.