Orianthi's O fails to build on early promise

You can't fault Orianthi's style on fourth solo album O, but the songs fall short

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Orianthi: O album artwork
(Image: © Frontiers)

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Australian guitar goddess Orianthi gets her solo career back on track after a seven-year gap that included a four-year musical and personal detour with Richie Sambora that arguably did her few favours (and him even less). 

But whether largely repeating the format of her 2013 album Heaven In This Hell is the right way to go about it is debatable.

You can’t fault her 80s guitar style (heavy on gain and compression) – which so impressed the likes of Steve Vai, Santana, Carrie Underwood, Alice Cooper, and Michael Jackson who enlisted her for the ill-fated This Is It band. 

However, what sounded like a launch pad for her guitar and bluesier-than-Avril Lavigne voice has never really taken off. The same goes for some of the songs here, alas, which have failed to build on the early promise.

Hugh Fielder
Hugh Fielder

Hugh Fielder has been writing about music for 47 years. Actually 58 if you include the essay he wrote about the Rolling Stones in exchange for taking time off school to see them at the Ipswich Gaumont in 1964. He was news editor of Sounds magazine from 1975 to 1992 and editor of Tower Records Top magazine from 1992 to 2001. Since then he has been freelance. He has interviewed the great, the good and the not so good and written books about some of them. His favourite possession is a piece of columnar basalt he brought back from Iceland.