Frenetic shredding and sound effects galore highlight this outing from Borge Olsen. The Norwegian guitar master has brilliant command of the instrument, as demonstrated throughout Music in the Dark. His fingers fly up and down the fretboard, though it’s more than occasionally at the expense of melody.
Music in the Dark features both new tunes and reworked material from decades past. Olsen wrote the title track back in 1982 as an instrumental, then decided a few weeks later to add vocals. Now all these years on, he’s re-recorded the whole thing, but kept the original vocals. They are deep in the mix, however, coming off mostly as simply another instrument.
“Skvulp” was originally written and recorded around the same time period, while “Question” and “Story” date from the 1990s; the remainder of Music in the Dark is from the present day. “Skvulp” is one of the more melodic tunes on the album, built around a recurring riff that Borge Olsen dances around, before it takes a turn into pure shredding territory. The lattermost is particularly enjoyable when the soloing relaxes into the riffs that make up the structure of the tune.
In fact, the best results come when Olsen relaxes – or at least when the tune does. “After the Dark” finds him on acoustic guitars, and even when he returns to electric on the following “Electronic Factory,” Olsen seems more connected to a real tune, rather than simply going crazy.
Taken as a whole, Music in the Dark is reminiscent of guitar-based Euro-fusion from the ’90s, with a large dose of frenetic hair-metal guitar. It’s just too bad that Borge Olsen the songwriter didn’t constrain Borge Olsen the guitarist more. An axe-slinger’s album from start to finish, it may not be everyone’s cup of tea.
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