Canadian Ewan Dobson is an impressive force in the acoustic guitar world (he takes no prisoners in the fingerpicking/classical circuit), and he’s got a whole lotta metal coursing through his veins, too. Here he follows up his Acoustic Metal album with more of what the title promises, and it works: like last time, the vibe is late-evening street performer in LA, the tunes being plucked fast and furious, but never in a novelty fashion (and while last album featured fingerpicking, this one is all with a pick, for those guitar geeks taking notes out there). Rather, this sounds like something that could be playing in the background in a nice restaurant, even though song titles like ‘Forced Into Compliance’ and ‘Seduced And Beaten With Hammers’ (or the either-creepy-or-romantic ‘When She Breathes At Night, I Listen’) reveal the true metal spirit here. And sure enough, the songs at their core are basically thrash metal stripped down, songs like the aforementioned ‘When She Breathes At Night, I Listen’ finding that middle ground between Rust In Peace and street-performer flamenco (no surprise he recently guested on a Marty Friedman tune), Dobson once again here creating something that sounds on paper like a gimmick but plays, like, totally awesome. I prefer this over his last due to the relative brevity of it, this one only clocking in at an hour (!), compared to the double-disc marathon of last time. And check the cover art, all scratchy pencil crayon illustration as if nothing past Metal Massacre III ever happened. This Dobson guy’s alright.