KIKO LOUREIRO – Theory Of Mind

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7.0

Looking at him in the face you certainly wouldn't think so and, frankly speaking, even listening to the freshness and versatility of Kiko Loureiro's music you would struggle to understand that behind those six strings hides a guitarist born more than five decades ago. Five decades spent making the guitar his means of maximum expression, treading on very important stages, releasing excellent solo works, teaching music, fifty-two years lived and played with top-level artists such as Angra, Tarja Turunen and Megadeth.
“Theory Of Mind” is the first solo album released by the artist after the separation from Dave Mustaine's band, and represents a work that perhaps summarizes all the influences that these years of music have had on his artistic and creative growth. With a compositional phase that began two years ago, “Theory Of Mind” tells us about a Loureiro who needs greater compositional freedom and a sonic freshness that is difficult to find in structured and acclaimed bands like Megadeth.
The Brazilian guitarist's latest work gives the listener new and interesting ideas, such as the rough and progressive opening of “Borderliner” or the more aggressive and biting flavors of songs like “Blindfolded” and “Out Of Nothing”; flavors, these, which are detached from the sounds presented in the artist's first solo works and clearly influenced by the militancy conducted in one of the major thrash groups in the world.
The harshness of post-Megadeth Kiko, however, blends brilliantly with his inevitable melodic touch which manifests itself in excellent sung openings – often sweetened by Brazilian sounds – during the choruses of songs like “Mind Rose”, not to mention the inevitable mold virtuosic and passionate that explodes in pieces like “Point Of No Return”. The song describes the approach of the point of no return in a world ferociously contaminated by artificial intelligence and makes speed its strong point from the first seconds, dedicated to the Brazilian driver Ayrton Senna, thanks to a faithful imitation of his reproduced acceleration with the whammy bar of the guitar.
“Theory Of Mind” is a wild album, almost a symbol of liberation from the chains that were weighing on Loureiro and which perhaps contributed to the separation with Megadeth, to instead re-embrace the dimension of solitary artist and architect of his own destiny: the last Kiko's solo work is the result of a pressure cooker that was perhaps kept on the stove for too long and could do nothing but explode in a roar of roaring creativity.
If from the point of view of energy and passion Kiko's new album certainly leaves nothing to be desired, we must underline how his latest album has lost a bit of that refinement that has always characterized his previous works, which has allowed him in the past to rise above the modern guitar mediocrity made up of artists who, more and more often, have little or nothing to say.
As previously mentioned, “Theory Of Mind” sounds like a sanguine and impulsive album that shows us the more metal and rasping side of the artist but which, at the same time, leaves that of the composer a little aside, to whom we were pleasantly aware get used to it.