THE TRUTH HURTS
“I CALL IT ‘sharpening the knife,’” says Tosin Abasi, describing the approach he and his longtime Animals As Leaders guitar partner Javier Reyes adopted when recording the group’s super-aggressive fifth album, Parrhesia. “On the past couple of albums, we explored a lot of different directions; we got very experimental and we did some fusion-y stuff. This time out, Javier and I consolidated the elements we wanted to incorporate and we went for a more bludgeoning experience.” He laughs. “That sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?”
30 JOE SATRIANI TOSIN ABASI & JAVIER REYES DONNA GRANTIS NICK JOHNSTON STEVE VAI GUTHRIE GOVAN YVETTE YOUNG PLINI OMAR RODRÍGUEZ-LÓPEZ ERIC JOHNSON NITA STRAUSS JULIAN LAGE MIKE SULLIVAN MATEUS ASATO TIM HENSON & SCOTT LEPAGE MARK LETTIERI MATTEO MANCUSO MIKE DAWES LARI BASILIO ANDY TIMMONS GREG HOWE PAT METHENY RORY FRIERS & NIALL KENNEDY ANGEL VIVALDI JASON BECKER MARCOS MENA JOHN McLAUGHLIN JEFF BECK
For Javier Reyes, the decision to operate at this maximum intensity was a no-brainer. “We did the more ambiguous thing, so this album is our way of telling people, ‘Don’t get things twisted — we can still go hard,’” he says. “We like the fusion-y jazz stuff; otherwise, we wouldn’t have written it. But at the end of the day, our roots are in progressive metal. That’s the core of our fan base — metal fans. So we wanted to go back and continue that train of thought.”
It’s been six years since Abasi, Reyes and drummer Matt Garstka issued an Animals As Leaders album (their last effort was 2016’s ). That’s the
