The Elephants of Mars

This is the eighteenth studio album, released by earMUSIC on 8 April 2022. Epic and its parent Sony Music had issued everything since the self-titled record of 1995, so this is his first album away from them in that time; Ward Records put out the Japanese edition the same day as GQCS-91181. The pandemic meant the band could not gather in one studio, so each player recorded at home or in a private studio and the parts were assembled afterwards. Keyboardist Rai Thistlethwayte sent his work from Australia and Ned Evett recorded his voiceover in Galveston, Texas. Every guitar part was cut in Satriani's home studio, direct into a SansAmp plugin Avid made in the mid-1990s; each time the band set a real amplifier against it, he says, the plugin won. The only pedals used were a TC Sub 'N' Up octaver and a wah, while the delays, flangers and phasers came from plugins or from the outboard gear of Greg Koller, who mixed and mastered the record and ran every guitar through a 1176 limiter that had belonged to Les Paul. The title comes from a story Satriani wrote. Scientists from Earth terraform Mars into a garden planet and accidentally create gigantic telepathic elephants that play music with their trunks; the elephants side with the colonists against the Earth corporations stripping the planet of its resources. The first single, Sahara, came out on 19 January 2022, and readers of Guitar World voted the album the seventh best guitar record of 2022. The running order here is the import CD's as printed.