Words: David McNamee

Behind the myriad pop hooks of Marnie Stern’s critically-adored debut album, there’s a constantly shifting pattern of shimmering guitar glissando. She is finger-tapping, the accursed technique of Eighties big hair guitarists. It’s a hallucinogenic texture that hooks the listener’s ears on the snagging rain of notes and takes advantage of the hypnotic effect so she can then howl random images into their brain. When Eddie Van Halen did it was “like masturbating”.

Marnie Stern – Patterns of a Diamond Ceiling

It was ALWAYS a good noise.

It’s unlikely that this obscurity on Kill Rock Stars will make eight-finger-tapping cool again, but it does emphasise the sheer abstract-ness of guitar solos. Guitar solos are meaningless, non-literal – there is no logical reason in any rock or pop song why this instrument should suddenly arc out in a furious scribble of notes and go widdlywiddlyneoewwreeogh!!

Other than as pure texture, which can be exaggerated by dislocating that pattern of guitar and using it as miasmic audio wallpaper, like Marnie Stern – or Eddie Van Halen in ‘Eruption’ – guitar solos are purely functional. I like guitar solos that are used to throttle-up a piece of music, that fuel-inject. One band took that premise and used it to tear music a new soul: Slayer.

The Slayer tagteam of Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman spent years trying to imitate Judas Priest’s duelling guitar leads. They never really learnt how to play according to the musical theory of their heroes – y’know, scales and all that jazz. So they made up something else instead.

People still don’t quite get Slayer.

Slayer songs are whirling, almost mathematical grids of noise that are sliced up and down by the serial killer guitar solos of King and Hanneman. When their BC Rich guitars lash out across Reign In Blood, it’s convincingly like a flickknife to the face. Drummer Dave Lombardo described the guitar leads as being power points that trigger his rhythms. When the music skids into a guitar solo his pace picks up, instinctively releasing a flurry of beats that splits Slayer’s sound into a cryptic maze, constantly rearranging and patrolled by circular saw-blades.

Dragonforce play their solos like video-game power-ups. The point where the solo screams in is the bit where you get an invincibility shield, or where Sonic turns into SuperSonic. In one video, ‘Force guitarists Sam and Herman are even shown ‘playing’ themselves on a console controller as they battle in a Mortal Kombat guitar duel. Check it here.

People laugh, but I want my guitar heros to be Merlins who believe that if they play fast enough they can pull Randy Rhoads’ aeroplane back through space-and-time like a fingers-aflame Donnie Darko. The way that Steve Vai almost certainly knew he was the devil’s guitar player when he ran pentagrammatic rings around Karate Kid in Crossroads.

When Vai plays it straight, though, it’s boring. Like the incidental music from Top Gun. It’s guitar as soulful melisma, as diva. A priapic wail purpose-built to soundtrack images of stars and stripes scaling up flagpoles, and fluttering with indefatigability.

The devil’s real guitar player is Morbid Angel’s seven-stringer Trey Azagthoth, a man who reportedly sees visions when he solos, from “the other side… something that is definitely not human.” Death metal solos are senseless strangling of notes that seek to invoke more than blithely evoke.

A good guitar solo drags out what the lyrics can’t quite voice. In Brian Eno’s ‘Baby’s On Fire’, Robert Fripp’s solo makes Eno’s cubist tune into wreckage. It melts down whatever the lyrics leave. Funkadelic’s ‘Maggot Brain’ is just spiralling fractals of solo growing like alien fauna – chiming with the eco-warning spoken introduction.

Brian Eno – Baby’s On Fire

Perhaps the reason why this pseudosynaesthesia works on guitars and doesn’t on, say, saxophones, is almost purely because of the extreme sense of physicality you get from the sound of a writhing guitar.

I love metal because the playing is so locked-in, that I find it affecting my breathing, my pulse and my whole physical constitution. It’s like having guitar strings threaded through your veins. When the solo scythes in it can rip you right apart or transcend you – like Kirk Hammett’s dash for freedom in ‘Fade To Black’, the frantic flurry of notes Mastodon conjure to ward off evil, or the psychedelically sad, inconsolable harmonic screams of the late Dimebag.

And all the while Kerry King shreds at the strings, as I twitch, helplessly, and laughs like the damned.

Van Halen – Eruption

Marnie Stern shreds it for Dave live in Brighton this Friday 13th July at The Greenhouse Effect.

Epilogue -
This post is tagged with marnie stern robert fripp van halen