Artist: Daniel Palmqvist  
   Title: A Landscape Made From Dreams
   Label: Lion Music

'A Landscape Made From Dreams' is the debut album from Swedish guitar maestro Daniel Palmqvist.  This is more than just another guitar player’s album, it's an album that breaks the barriers that generally surround such guitar based albums.  It contains 12 tracks of accessible musical genius that will appeal not only to guitar players, but also to the more humble rock fan who has a passion for good quality music.

The album takes its soundings from Palmqvist’s varying influences and uses his knowledge of the six string to great effect.  Right from his early classical guitar teachings to his time at the Musical Institute in California, even reflecting on his time as a session musician back in his native Sweden, Daniel has taken all these informative years and put together a quite uniquely diverse album.  Together with a little help from his friends Daniel Flores and Johann Niemann of Minds Eye, keyboard players Johannes Stole, Kaspar Dahlqvist, Andreas Lindahl, and finally on bass Andreas Olsson.

The album opens up with the aptly named ‘Welcome’, a piece that gets the album off to a gentle start, before launching into ‘Devils Dance’, a more intricate piece that straight away highlights Palmqvist’s musical ability. 

The progressive sound of ‘Moment of Clarity’ is just superb with its soaring solos and Kaspar Dahlqvist is just magical on the keyboards. The album takes a gentler road with ‘If Things Were Different’, a track very much in the Eric Clapton vein of things, only this time with Johann Niemann providing the keyboard sections.

The intricacies of Palmqvist playing are sometimes breath taking.  Take for example the tracks ‘Riddle Me This’ and ‘Carte Blanche’, two completely different styles are used on these tracks, but they both have that unique listener friendly intricacy that keeps you strangely fixated.

The album continues with the winding, meandering solos of ‘After The Rain’ and the quite superb ‘Truffle Shuffle’, complete with an extract from The Goonies.  The diversity of the album continues with the far reaching ‘Behind The Mirror’ and the bluesy undertones of ‘Song For Pongo’.

The final two tracks ‘Words of Wisdom’ and the title track ‘A Landscape Made From Dreams’ are another two completely different types of musical pieces.  The first is a full on guitar fest with Palmqvist giving his all on the track and the second my favourite track on the album, is a more harder edged piece that once again delves into the realm of prog with its high reaching guitar riffs and orchestra undertones and a quite astounding keyboard solo from Andreas Lindahl.

This album will set tongues wagging not only in the musicians camps but also in the ranks of mere mortals like myself who will take this album and use it as the bench mark for all guitar based albums to follow in the future.

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