Gus G.

"I Am The Fire"

Live at The Whisky a Go Go

Hollywood, California

October 15th, 2014

Review and Photos by Travis Baumann

Gus G. is the Greek metal guitarist that has literally taken the world by storm, a fire storm in his case. Gus has played guitar for legendary metal acts such as Mystic Prophecy, Arch Enemy, Dream Evil, and Nightrage. He is founding member of the awesome "Firewind" and if that wasn't amazing enough, he was hired on as Ozzy's lead guitarist after Zakk Wylde left the band.

Gus G. recently released a solo album featuring a number of great artists singing vocals and is now touring in support of that release.

For his live tour he has Jeff Scott Soto as his lead singer who also comes with a fine pedigree in that he has sang for the brilliant Yngwie Malmsteen, Talisman, his only solo project Soto and of all things took over for Journey as well.

I am a huge fan of Firewind and I also love the new Ozzy record that Gus played on so I was definitely down for when his solo album came out. It is a great album with a lot of variation due to all the different singers. It would be very interesting to see how that all translated to a live show and what they would do for a setlist.

They opened the set with "My Will Be Done" and followed that up with my favorite song off of "I Am The Fire", "Eyes Wide Open".

The continued with "Blame It On Me" and another of my favorites "Vengence". Jeff did a good job singing on the songs that he did not record on the album and handled all their variance well.

Soto's own contribution to the album was the song "Summer Days" which is one of the slower, more ballad like tracks on the release. He gave some details about the writing process with Gus and what influenced that song for him. They played "Wrath" which is a song from Soto's own solo project which I was not familiar with as well.

The next bit of the set really got me pumped up as they did a cover version of Firewind's "World on Fire" which I absolutely love as did a lot of the people in the audience gauging by the sing along. They followed that up with "The Fire and the Fury" another awesome Firewind song.

They continued the set with "Terrified" and then did something really cool, they did a cover of Black Sabbath's "Into the Void" which Soto really nailed.

Going back to Gus's solo work they did "Redemption" before doing the title track and another one of my favorites, "I Am the Fire".

To finish things off the tell-tale opening riff of "Crazy Train" let loose and they brought it to a close with a bang.

It was a great show and a lot of fun to see him do so much different stuff.  I have seen him play with Firewind before and love that project but I also really liked the diversity of his solo album and thought they did a great job bringing to a live reality. I cant wait to see him again in whatever project brings him here next.

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