Guitarist JOE STUMP (HOLYHELL) is featured in a new interview discussing his latest solo album, Revenge Of The Shredlord. An excerpt is available below:

By Carl Begai

Stump has taken a noteworthy amount of flak over the years for channelling Ritchie Blackmore and Yngwie Malmsteen in his music, and that’s not about to stop with Revenge Of The Shredlord. On the contrary, there are some glaring in-your-face examples of Stump’s hero worship and he stands happily guilty as charged.

“If you like RITCHIE BLACKMORE and you like YNGWIE MALMSTEEN you’d love some of my records, so I don’t know why anybody would be griping. Somebody that's dying to hear Blackmore play this stuff again would love some of the tracks on my new record. Tracks like ‘The Black Knight’s Castle’ and ‘In The Master’s House’, they’re straight up Blackmore.”
“I get dogged for the Yngwie thing more than I do for Blackmore,” he laughs. “Not necessarily by press people, but if someone is talking shit about me on one of those various internet forums the complaint is always ‘He sounds like Yngwie.’ Or they’ll post some of my tracks and say ‘Hey! The new Yngwie record sounds good!’ (laughs). It’s funny because I get that way more, while the Blackmore influence is much more prominent to me. So many people are uneducated about Blackmore’s playing, especially in the States. Here he’s known as the Old Guy That Wrote ‘Smoke On The Water’. ”

Keeping the Blackmore comparisons in mind, several of the tracks on the new album sound as if they would stand up equally well with vocals. Maybe so, but Stump says he wasn’t thinking about standard songwriting structures when putting Revenge Of The Shredlord together.

“I just come up with a melody in my head and go with it. I write everything organically, banging away like any other metal moron, and something comes to me. I might marry a couple things together as I go. I don’t really think in terms of a vocal melody, I just think of things in terms of being bad-ass and cool guitar-wise with inflections, tones, which pick-ups I’m using. I’m old school, so a lot of my stuff is…. ‘Pistoleros’ is a straight up metal tune, for example, and even though it’s instrumental I think you can hear how it might be a track with vocals.”

Go to this location for the complete story.

Revenge Of The Shredlord, is out now via Lion Music, It features the following 12 songs:

'The Ritual Begins'

'Man Your Battlestations'

'Pistoleros'

'Shredlord's Sonata'

'Master's Prelude'

'In The Master's House'

'The Black Knight's Castle'

'Enter The Coven'

'Evil Beasts Below'

'Strat Outa Hell'

'White Knuckle Mayhem'

'The End Approaches'

"Revenge Of The Shredlord is quite heavy and classically influenced," Stump remarked recently. "This one’s all metal from start to finish, very dark and focused with gratuitous amounts of shredding throughout. Also, thanks to the great work of engineer Ducky Carlise and mastering engineer Maor Appelbaum, it’s my best sounding record to date as well."

Check out audio samples from the entire album below:

>