Albums that means something to me, part 5: Rising Force – Odyssey
Music is quite amazing and when I started listen to music back in the 80’s there was a lot of great artists, records and songs. One of my favourite persons were Pär Fontander who was hosting the radio show “Rockbox” on swedish national radio. Every saturday I was sitting in my room and press the rec button on my tape recorder and I recorded every single program (unfortunately I don’t have the tapes anymore) and I was listening to it over and over again for a whole week. And then it was saturday again and Rockbox was back with a new broadcast.
When it comes to many of the albums in this serie of articles my first experience was when Pär played the music on Rockbox. I remember Pär was doing an interview with Yngwie and he was so extremely glad that Joe Lynn Turner was singing on the album, a year later the tone was different and at that point the honeymoon was over and Joe Lynn Turner was no longer a member of Yngwie J. Malmsteen’s Rising Force.
One thing that no one can take away is the fact that they made a quite brilliant album called “Odyssey” and it was released on the 8th of april 1988. The first single from the album was “Heaven Tonight” which had hit potential and it made it all the way to Tracks which was the hit list on swedish radio back then. The song peaked at number 15 in june 1988 and on the same chart we also found “Rhythm Of Love” (Scorpions) and “Only One Woman” (Alien).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogHeqgmoYBU
I bought the album and it was spinning several times on my vinyl player. It was with this album I realized that Jens Johansson was one of the best keyboard players out there, check out the intro for “Now Is The Time” if you don’t believe me. I also discovered that Yngwie was quite capable writing extremely good hard rock songs. Songs like “Rising Force”, “Crystal Ball”, “Faster Than The Speed Of Light”, “Dreaming (Tell Me)” and “Riot In The Dungeons” is a string of pearls in the hard rock world. For me this is still the best album Yngwie has ever made and I’ll be in a good mood every time I listen to the album.
