In a recent episode I responded with the song He-Man Woman Hater by the band Extreme. The guitarist is Nuno Bettencourt, one of my major influences. Everything about the album Pornographatti (which He-Man is on) is just ridiculous, over-the-top and radically unnecessary guitar pyrotechnics. Nuno consistently overplays and there is no semblance of balance. That is why it is paradise. I couldn’t imagine the album any other way and wouldn’t want it to be. It deserves to be unbalanced, is great precisely because Nuno not only steals, but hogs, the show.
He-Man Woman Hater starts out with Flight of the Wounded Bumblebee, which is Nuno’s take on the orchestra classic by Rimsky-Korsakov. Of course Nuno’s is way cooler, with all the delay and distortion and tapping and what not. But the real thunder of the song crashes in immediately after that, when Nuno begins assaulting our ear buds with one of the most high-octane riffs to fly off a fretboard. The riff itself — BAH, duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh,duh, etc- is, at first, flabbergasting, and takes a minute to comprehend what’s happening: an exceedingly dynamic, fluttering and FAST, hammer on and pull off ascent and descent, before suddenly barreling into big fat G and D chords. It really is the dynamics of it all that makes this my favorite guitar riff. At points the tone is muted, plucky and thin, at other points slippery, pinchy, and thick. Descriptive sentences are of little utility, you simply have to listen to the song.