Zakk Wylde Pisses Me Off

Perhaps that’s a bit of a misleading title, but I bought the new Black Label Society Skullage CD because I like the mellow songs, but it didn’t say neither explicit lyrics or clean and the songs that are explicit are edited. That kind of pissed me off. If it’s clean, clearly mark the god damned cd and say it’s clean regardless of whether it has the black and white warning or not.

The thing that pisses me off about Zakk Wylde is that it seems that he feels a need to make it known that he’s a great guitar player. We all know this. All of his mellow, acoustic songs are awesome, there is no arguing that, but when he takes an electric song and makes it acoustic he feels some need to still play these intricate solos on an acoustic guitar and they end up sounding rather, well, stupid!. Seriously, if we’ve learned anything from all the bands that have done an unplugged session they take the solos in the song and slow them down and make them fit.

On the Skullage CD there are the last three songs that are acoustic live numbers. The ridiculousness of taking an acoustic guitar and playing a shredding solo is just, for lack of better words, retarded. Again, sort of like the solo on In This River. I’ve said it before, but the solo on that song sounds so out of place it makes me want to skip that part of the song. I don’t mean to be a cynical bastard but when you have a song like that you want to hear a solo that is slower and has feeling sort of like a Pink Floyd solo. Although it was written before Dimebag’s death and the solo could, perhaps be considered a shredding tribute to the late great, it still sounds weird.

You know what I would love to hear, is Zakk Wylde do a cover of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Simple Man. I don’t know if he’s already done that but I’m sure it would sound amazing. Which reminds me…(you can almost hear it if you listen closely)

Here is the video for my favorite song on the CD, Spoke In The Wheel.