Positives:
1. Mix is much better than WTEAW. While not excellent, it is very good.
2. Some new things by Yngwie, and some nice melodies in some of the tunes. A few of the songs are very good...for example, the main riff to "Valley of the Kings" is excellent, and the faint distance backing vocals are cool. I also like the little classical interlude in the middle of the song. "Ship of Fools" is good too, with a catchy vocal melody, and as sick as I get of Yngwie's descending pedal point lines sometimes, I like them as a part of the main melody of this song. "Valhalla" is a great tune, and Yngwie, again while doing the same 3-string arpeggios and descending pedal point lines, at least mixes the two together in an interesting fasion in this tune.
3. Yngwie's playing is as fast and clean as ever
4. Doogie's singing is very good
Negatives:
1. Some of the songs I could do without. For example, "Mad Dog", while has a cool riff, has a terrible vocal melody and overall is a very uninteresting tune.
2. Yngwie's guitar solos sound extremely stale to my ears. Occasionally he'll surprise me with something different but overall I'm hearing tons of moving up and down harmonic minor scales, either linearly or in groups of 4 moving up or down diatonically. Not a lot of dynamics in his solos as in his early stuff....for the most part he goes 180 mph from beginning to end. I feel I could take any Yngwie guitar solo on any of the songs or any recent albums and just exchange them and not notice a difference.
3. Keyboards are very little used, which is a shame because he had a great player in Derek Sherinian.
4. Rhythm guitar sound is muddy, although that is typical of all Yngwie albums since he doesn't use different amp settings for his rhythm sound and Strats have an overall muddy rhythm sound to them as it is.
5. Lots of repetition of ideas...for example, the reworking of the "Motherless Child" riff. Song structures are really repetitive, too...for example, listen to the consistent interludes after a chorus, followed by a chord change and a 180 mph guitar solo.
Overall, better than WTEAW and Alchemy, but not as good as FTA. A step in the right direction but I'd like to see Yngwie take bigger steps.
What I would like to see Yngwie do:
1. Feature keyboards more. Not necessarily key/guitar solo exchanges (although those are cool), but more interesting interplay between keyboards and guitar, like counterpoint ideas. Listen to any Symphony X CD and that's how I'd like to see Yngwe start to utilize keys. Get progressive.
2. Play with some odd meter ideas...get a bit "out there" and experiment.
3. Get more musically complex. A lot of Yngwie's music is very simple compositionally...again, I'd like to see a more progressive approach. For example, "Icarus Dream Suite" off the first album is an example of a progressive tune...a lot of variation and different melodic ideas, and very little repetition in the song. A long song yet keeps your interest from beginning to end.
4. I think Yngwie could stand for more variation without necessarily departing from his style. For example, Yngwie uses a lot of pedal point ideas, but he's limited in how he uses them...for example, how about some ascending lines over a pedal tone? It's rare to hear Yngwie do that...I almost always hear descending lines. There's a lot of ways to explore the ideas of using pedal tones...Yngwie has only scratched the surface. Listen to Vinnie Moore...there's a guy who uses pedal tones in a variety of ways. I guess what I would like is for Yngwie to sound different from album to album, while still keeping his style. Symphony X does this...every album sounds different, yet they all sound like Symphony X.
5. Maybe try <gasp> working a solo out rather than improvising? I know that's heresy in Yngwie's world, but it might help break the staleness. When solos are improvised constantly, the soloist has a tendency to constantly reach into the old bag of tricks.
Well, that's my review. Attack! is about what I expected from Yngwie. Not a bad effort but nothing to knock my socks off either.
