SANDCASTLE

An intriguing and clearly talented initial effort from this Croatian guitar virtuoso.

As a guitarist Mihaljevic belongs to what I usually refer to as the Satriani school of players: He's good at crafting strong melodic guitar solos, and saves the shredding for select occasions. As a musician and composer he's also able to cover a few more stylistic grounds than many of his colleagues - Sandcastle is pretty atypical as far as solo albums from guitarists go.

Half the songs on this disc feature vocals, and while an extended variety of styles are featured these showcase Mihaljevic's skills as a composer much more than as a guitarist: The compositions comes across as well thought out efforts rather than as foundations for showing off technical and virtous guitar skills. The latter is very much a part of the album though, but as embellishments to the composition rather than as the main feature.

A strong effort if you're intrigued by classy guitar playing and have a taste in music that spans many different genres and expressions.

Ivan Mihaljevicis a young guitarist from Croatia releasing his first solo album in 2008 named Sandcastle. Quite good debute, not far from Satriani or Vai fame in manner of composing but with a clearly prog metal infusing elements here and there. Pleasent is aswell his voice on some tracks, not somthing spectacular but an ok voice for this music. His talent here is obvious, nice work, even great arrangements on some tunes like on Cascading Mirrors ,great and inventive arrnagements, smooth guitar lines and on Shimmering Karma , the rest are ok, good but not realy excellent. So a good debute by this unknown musicin who desearve a far wider recognition.3-3.5 He just released his second effort in 2010, looking forward to hear , if is as good as this one, then this young guitarist has a bright future.