FOUR O'CLOCK AND HYSTERIA

Four O'Clock and Hysteria is Spock's Beard guitarist Alan Morse's debut solo album. It consists of 12 instrumental tracks consisting of just over an hour of music. Alan channels his inner-Joe Satriani on this album with a number of guitar riffs that would fit in nicely while surfing with aliens or travelling in a time machine. His brother Neal assists on keyboards, and he is accompanied by Gary Lunn on bass and Scott Williamson on drums, but this album is mostly about Alan and his guitars. Since I am not a guitarist, or for that matter, a musician, I can't go into any details about his style of guitar playing, but he does seem to have a fairly eclectic group of tracks with a bluesy sound on R Bluz, a funky sound on First Funk, an Yngwie Malmsteen classical guitar sound on The Rite of Left, and as previously mentioned I hear plenty of Joe Satriani-esque sounds throughout the album. If you are a fan of the Joe Satriani style guitar-led instrumental album then this is definitely an album for you to check out. Spock's Beard fans should definitely take the time to hear their guitar hero strut his stuff outside of the confines of the symphonic sound of Spock's Beard. Overall, I rate this album with 3 stars, as it is a good album, but it isn't essential.

Also, just to mention this though, I really like the album cover, where it is entirely in black and white, except for him and his guitar, which are in color. It has a nice effect.