After Eclipse, I felt he was becoming very redundant, but he still played well, at times.
It’s not his best performance. …
Nice camera angle at 4:30. Apparent forearm rotation. Also this rotation is very apparent at 13:47.
He sounds extremely sloppy at times, but he still got that furiousness and expression to his playing which I always liked. Also I think he looks quite good (I expected to see him fatter 
).
He looks great. Apparently he decided to grow some porkchops as opposed to eating some porkchops.
Things with his playing got a little weird after his Spellbound album. Tempo was off, tone was off, no singer, no band, but it started to make sense when he told that much of the album was recorded on first take. He calls them inspirational moments caught on tape and then released on a record.
This is sort of what he is now, as if he has moved beyond playing with the band or in tempo or even correctly. It might explain why he looks so indifferent when he plays the old stuff.
His chops, though… I can’t tell. He no longer plays slow, ever, but I firmly believe he can play things he could not in the 80s. He does more complicated stuff, but not cleanly or to the beat. Still, if he pauses he gymnastics on stage and steadies his eyeball on the neck, he plays better than his younger self. Those moments are not easy to find, but they are there yet he does not care to give them too much.
The bottom line: I’ve been listening to too much Yngwie lately. The contrast to his 80s stuff is not always favourable.
Do you know if Yngwie drinks much and if drinking might be affecting the quality of his playing? I ask because I know he used to like to drink quite a bit and in one interview in what I seem to recall was Guitar For The Practicing Musician he said “I can be drunk off my ass and still play my songs perfectly”! That was a very old interview, probably mid 1980s.
@Acecrusher I saw an interview long ago, like 15 years or so, where Yngwie surprised everybody by drinking non-alcoholic beer. He said he had cut drinking to almost nothing. He now claims having been totally sober for over decade. Who knows, but if you look at the video which began this thread, that’s not a 55 year old drunk.
I think what might have more effect is the nearly fatal car crash of '87. He was in coma for a week and when he woke up his right hand had nerve damage, it was effectively paralyzed. Don’t know if you hear it, but to me it is fairly obvious that the staccato-like picking he did before the crash was permanently gone. His picking starting from '88 Odyssey is softer. There is nothing else I can hear, the skill is there, perhaps even enhanced, but it’s like the pick angle changed or something. Haven’t analyzed any videos before and after, though.
Fast forward to 2018 and something is not right anymore. Has some of his past caught up with him or what?
I think this was a particularly bad day, I wouldn’t take it as fully representative of his current ability. By randomly scrolling the video (didn’t watch it all), there are moments of brilliant playing scattered here and there. So I think that on a good night he could still kill it!
I think that’s a fair assessment. I always look to the the Steeler - Eclipse Era for definitive malmsteen. … the instructional video he did for Young Guitar is very good.
His current sound bothers me more than anything else. … so much reverb and delay… and this glissando technique he constantly uses now… nothing he plays has any definition. .
Good thing Joe Stump and M.Romeo are around to carry the neo classical torch…