Ex-ONWARD guitarist Toby Knapp (GODLESS RISING) is featured in a new interview with Tastes Like Rock. An excerpt from the interview is available below.

TLR: Your name has been known in the industry since Guitar World Magazine profiled you at the age of 18, and you've been shredding around the world since both solo and with a number of different outfits. In that time has performing ever gotten to be old hat for you or is it still as exciting as when you were first coming up?

Toby: "I'm still absolutely excited about it, really I feel there is so much more to do, so much to conquer. Playing around live in a really good band is a great feeling. Unfortunately I don't have that at the moment. Two albums come out this year and I really need a proper touring situation. I love playing for those that want to hear me play."

TLR: Your style is without question your own. Have you found your style largely on your own or have you been specifically influenced by any guitarists over your years playing the guitar?

Toby: "Thanks! I am very influenced by so many. I love Jimmy Page, Robert Fripp, Blackmore, Malmsteen, Jeff Beck, Friedman and Becker and many more. Through years of mixing these influences up I believe I may have found my sound, a rather crazy one, but I don't feel like a clone anymore. I've seen my name used as a point of reference in the press if a journalist is trying to describe another player's sound. 'So and so has that Toby Knapp sound'......that's a great feeling."

Go to this location for the complete interview.

Knapp recently issued a brief rundown of some of the songs on his new solo album, The Campaign:

"The title track opens the album and is an instrumental bringing Black Metal, Holdsworth and Ritchie Blackmore together with ill intent. Next we have 'Conspire' with Dean Sternberg on vocals, this is one of the best collaborations I have done and a few 'in the know' know it. Evil and melodic without trying. Up next is 'Towards Power Unimagined', an instrumental inspired by the book Seth: Blood Magick. This is a pretty vicious hybrid of true Metal genres and came at no small cost.

Next we have 'We Are Legions' with original Vital Remains vocalist Jeff Gruslin absolutely taking the track to new dimensions, guitars much like Presence / Deathwish era Page while Gruslin sings his song of War. After that it is a track I wrote in 1991, and re-recorded (with technical improvements) 'Telekinesis', thrash meets Steeler-era Yngwie and more hellish holocaust riffs when least expected. The album is so abrasive up to this point it is time for some rock like you haven't heard in years.

'Wicked' sounds like something that may have appeared on Zep's Physical Grafitti featuring vocalist Tom Cline, who mixes ALICE IN CHAINS and Zep resulting in the catchiest chorus I've heard in my music! After this Attila Csihar delivers the nightmare called 'Reanimation', and to hear Black Metal's greatest vocalist scream about rituals of The Golden Dawn over my music really makes the locals seem so............local. After that we have 'Plutonium Race', which is an instrumental that for me, sums up what neo-classical shred is all about, with a track like this, why fill an album with carbon copies?

Move to new musical terrain. Dean Sternberg gets the final track 'Lack of Inspiration' full of riffing that is a fuck you to the modern sound of metal, beating it at it's own game. Dean catches the vibe with angry vocals about; basically every other band is so pissed and dark and heavy and badass. Dean seems to complain that he's not going to fake the 'acid words of the messenger' because as the chorus says 'I have nothing to say that you don't already know.' I won't name the nice little bands putting on the pissed act, but we are actually quite pissed, but by the end of the record, what do you say? Album after album after album about hell on the earth and man's downfall and morals shot to shit, I think The Campaign says something fresh musically and lyrically in an overcrowded scene.

Then again, what do I know? ENJOY!"

More on Knapp at this location.