By Carl Begai
Back in January, former Megadeth guitarist Glen Drover offered a look inside his solo debut, Metalusion, which had just been completed. The record has since been released and received unexpectedly glowing reviews. Not that odds were in favour of Drover releasing something stale and sub- par, but smart money was on a large portion of his Megadeth-bred fans being disappointed that Metalusion isn’t the full-on rip-yer-face-off metal shred record they were expecting. All in spite of Drover’s warnings it wouldn’t be.
“A few people have made comments about that,” Drover agrees, “but it hasn’t been as common as you might expect. But, in my opinion… do we really, really need another album like that? There’s so much of that out there and it’s all great stuff, but for me to do a full blown instrumental metal record with solos every five seconds, it gets boring for me after five minutes, never mind 50 minutes of it. With all due respect to the guys that are doing that stuff, it’s cool, but it’s just too much for me. With that kind of thing I almost start asking where the vocals are.”
“I listen to instrumental stuff as much as I listen to music with vocals. Me and Shawn (Drover / Megadeth drummer) did the instrumental stuff way back in the early ‘90s when we were starting to get the Eidolon thing rolling. We just had a four track, a drum machine, some guitar gear, and we did the best we could, and it turned into a metal band with vocals. This time out, I just wanted to do an instrumental album properly.”
Defining “properly” as not boring the masses to tears with bars upon bars of “need more frets!” wankery.
“You’ve got to be really careful with instrumental stuff. Trying to hold the listener’s attention without vocals isn’t an easy thing to do. When you’re doing this kind of music you have to make it colourful. You can’t restrict yourself to one style. My tones are still there, so it’s not like I’m playing country music (laughs), but there are other things that we’ve embraced on the album as well, and I think that’s what keeps people’s attention.”
“One of the things I’m most proud of on this album is that there’s no trickery,” he continues “As you know, there’s a lot of trickery that goes on these days with auto-tuning vocals, tweaking the guitars and drums. There’s nothing like that on Metalusion. It’s just really good musicianship; all the guys are great players and we just took our time doing it. We’re really happy about the fact we did it the old school way. It’s cool that people are able to construct songs and make music using these computer programs that are out there, but to have the drummer actually playing all the parts and getting the best performance possible put to tape, for example, that’s the best.”
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