Steve Vai
Sex And Religion

More than Sex and Religion, this album should have been called "Music And Money", because if the stories of the bed and those of the Gospel are incongruent for most, never before has it been so blatantly evident that talent means less than nothing compared to a big pile of money.
As long as dear old Steve had worked with Zappa and later with David Lee Roth, turning "Eat 'em and Smile" and especially "Skycraper" into contemporary masterpieces, the guy with the long slender fingers had never missed a beat; then meeting Dave Coverdale, the American success and the silk sheets where Tawni Kateen rolled around... it must have gone to his head strongly! Steve then thinks that to make money he must comply with market demands, because you know, a solo guitar album will hardly climb the heights of a hit parade, right?

So Vai gathers around him the talent of Terry Bozzio, T.M. Stevens, and the vocalist until then unknown (in fact he was a guitarist) David Townsend, baptizes the formation with his last name and releases one of those albums so hackneyed that I challenge any of his fans not to feel at least a slight embarrassment. Do you remember those brilliant compositions of "Flex-able"? Or the innovative rhythm of "PIL", "Skycreaper"?? "For The Love Of God"? Well, forget it all, now Steve embarks on American-style Rock manifestations aimed at an audience whose musical talent only matters if seen on MTV; so much so that the video for "In My Dreams With You" even circulated on purely VJ-Italian networks, where Steve played his beautiful white Jem inside an equally white room and was doused with buckets of red paint!

I can also tolerate that Vai's guitar becomes a mere decorative element meant to embellish rock Americana like: "In My Dreams With You" and "Still My Bleeding Heart", but when you hear Townsend yelling like a madman in "Dirty Black Hole" and "Down Deep Into The Pain", they seem like outtakes from some Skid Row album recordings! (not that I don't like them, but I think these are things you hardly expect from a Vai!)
I really wanted to throw the CD out of the window, but what mainly stopped me from doing so were three instrumental tracks where Steve gives us hope he hasn't completely lost his mind: "Touching Tongues" and "State of Grace" are wonderful emotional paintings that shine with Vai's typical touch, even if "The Road To Mt. Calvary" is a horror-gothic-industrial cauldron that is fleeting but remains more interesting than nonsense like "Pig".
The last piece is titled "Rescue Me or Bury Me" (Salvami o seppelliscimi) and if it hadn't been for the photos taken at the G3 with Satriani and Fripp, I would have strongly wanted to bury the corpse of Stephen Sirio Vai, praying with all my might for a quick resurrection.