The virtuoso super-guitarist is back with a head-banger that mixes both his unique brand of delicious guitar music with a rollicking groove that’s destined to stay in your head for a long, long time. This is grandiose guitar music by a grandiose guitar legend who’s got nothing more to prove to the world anymore. Nineteen Eighty is simply Satch doing what he does best—surfing with music that’s alien in imagination yet talks to you and moves you on your innermost core.
Though I have to say that I wasn’t really as euphoric about it on my very first listen, cause how unusually different it first felt from the regular batch of ‘first songs’ that we've heard from Satch’s previous albums—from ‘Shockwave Supernova’ to ‘Energy’. And compared to those, this track felt a little ‘empty’ to me, mainly cause I was eagerly waiting for a scorching guitar solo that’d take me to the upper atmosphere and...that just never arrived.
So as you can see, this track actually tip-toes around that usual ‘face-melting guitar extravaganza’ that we’ve come to expect from guitar icons such as Satch. But upon replaying it with the newly released video, it has become perfectly clear to me that this was actually aimed to be a very different musical experience than the usual fare of genre tropes that we’ve heard before. And boy, does it shine at being itself.
‘Nineteen Eighty’ can be described as a love letter to Satch’s tenure as a guitar player with ‘The Squares’ in the ‘80’s, as he himself has stated before. He brings that whole vibe back for a grandstanding galore of tasteful virtuosity, guitar-hero swagger and stark musical richness. It’s a celebration of everything that makes Satch’s music what it is, and I love it for being just that—unabashed, in-your-face and exotically rich.
The best thing that’s prevalent about this track is how it’s got an air of lightness and joy that was mostly missing in Satch’s last two albums. Cause the main theme in those albums was the idea of re-invention and change, now of course we’ve had some truly great guitar music out of those, but they also had a heavy sense of self-awareness that ended up weighing in on them.
But ‘Nineteen Eighty’ is Satch unchained, where he lets go of all those thematic ambivalence and just lets it rip. In this track, he’s not trying to sound new or anything else but simply expresses himself and what makes him one of the greatest guitar legends to walk the Earth. And he channels all of that fervor through his guitar, summons ethereal creatures with it’s mystical screams and closes it all off with a romp that only fits on guitar deities like himself. Overall, ‘Nineteen Eighty’ is a double whammy victory of a guitar track and I can’t wait for what happens next (heh, a pun worthy of Satch’s discography) from ‘Shapeshifting’.
Here’s the track in all it’s glory, knock yourselves out. And after that, let me know how you felt about it in the comments section.
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