Toby Knapp – The Campaign (2010)

After being blown away by Godless Rising latest album, we had to get more from Toby Knapp’s brilliant guitar skills. Luckily for us Shredguy Records, Toby’s label, hooked us up with his latest solo album “The Campaign”. Featuring a wide variety of styles, Toby manages to create the near perfect Shred release.

While most of the existing guitar virtuosos focus on Heavy/Progressive Metal tunes, Toby mixes things up with Trash, Black, and Death Metal influences. There is also a very cohesive sound to his music, it does not only showcases his abilities as a guitar player, but also as a multi-instrumentalist handling the bass guitar and most of the drum duties in this recording as well, suck on that John Petrucci.

Another good thing about this album is that while there is obviously an impressive display of guitar playing abilities in the shape of extreme shredding sections, the focus on good ‘simple’ riffs and solid songwriting seems to be of equal importance. This album is not a display of fast fingers and coordination for over 40 minutes, but instead is a well rounded exercise of shredding and diversity.

For those of us that love the DM growls Toby has invited fellow band mate from Godless Rising, Jeff Gruslin to show off his skills in the track “We Are Legions”, a song that could easily be a bonus track on any Godless Rising album. For the Black Metal fans there is a song featuring Attila Csihar and an overall aggressive BM sound (“Reanimation”). And for the purists of the genre there are a few songs with Dean Sternberg on the Heavy/Power Metal vocals, songs we that are not big fans off. There is also a song featuring Tom Cline that shows an even different face of Toby Knapp.

If you are a fan of Shred music you will get your daily dose with this release. But the best part of this album is that it has something for everybody, ranging from Heavy Metal to Black Metal. This will surely help the genre stay alive and get more people into the art of shredding. So don’t wait for other people to tell you how awesome this CD is, just go and get it and listen for yourself.

Release: January, 2010

Country: USA