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Alberto Rigoni — Nemesis Call
(Bandcamp no#, 2024, CD / DL)

by Jon Davis, Published 2025-09-14

Nemesis Call Cover art

Alberto Rigoni describes his music as “instrumental, progressive, shred, neoclassical metal,” and I’d say that sums it up pretty well. If you love to hear guitarists ripping off endless lines of blisteringly fast notes, Rigoni is your guy — except that he’s not a guitarist. He plays bass and keyboards, and all of the guitar parts are played by guests, fourteen different musicians in all. There are also a number of other guests, though it’s not detailed exactly what they play. The 17 tracks on the album are all relatively short, with one under two minutes and only one over five — the total length is just under an hour — so when considered in terms of notes played, Nemesis Call is an incredible bargain. I’m not into the world of metal shredding, and most of the players don’t have any other credits listed on Discogs, so I can’t speak to their backgrounds. From their playing, they’re all supremely capable technically and utterly interchangeable. Not a one of them stands out to me, and if you told me it was all one guitarist using fourteen different names, I could present no evidence to the contrary. That being said, it could well be that fans of this kind of thing may well enjoy it. To my ears it sounds more than a bit generic, which seems like an odd thing to say about music that exhibits such technical prowess. If any one of these tracks had come out in the mid-70s, the world would have been gushing about the amazing playing, but nowadays guitarists who can play this way are common enough to be unremarkable outside their community. Certainly a shredder with imagination can still stand out if they’re put in the context of imaginative music, but that’s not what we have here.

Filed under: New releases, 2024 releases

Related artist(s): Alberto Rigoni

More info
http://albertorigoni.bandcamp.com/album/nemesis-call

 

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