All Music Guide: (thanks Henry Olsen)
It ain't easy being Weiland. The oft-stoned, famously glittering Temple Pilot never got very much respect from the larger rock community. But lost amongst the cackling and grunge whispers was his talent as a vocal stylist, and what counts these days as veteran status.
In 2004 it's Velvet Revolver, and - surprise - Weiland's still getting grief. He's hired on with Slash, Duff, and Matt Sorum, fellow vets on the prod for rock glory in the shifting sands of post-zenith opportunity. Their legacies, however, are inverse. While the relevance of Weiland's CV is constantly in committee, the ex-G N' R'rs are like old hall of famers stopping by a little league game to sign trading cards. Axl's folly hasn't tainted their output - Midwesterners' dreams of California hedonism are still shaped mightily by the decadence and degradation of Appetite for Destruction.
It's the politics of Contraband. Therefore, the hubbub in the run-up to VR's debut has heard more chatter about court dates and drug use both present and past than any speculation about the band's sound. The stomp of Guns N' Roses with Slash's benzene slither, bedazzled with the glam and pike of a premier alt.rock frontman? The project should've been making the heshers' eyeballs pop. And imagine if Izzy had joined! As it is, enthusiasm re: Contraband has been guarded at best. But being unexpected only gets the Revolver down the vein quicker.
The album is modern smoked glass on the front of a rock club, stylized metal serration, old guard swagger piercing through glittery cool lamina. "Went too fast I'm out of luck and I don't even give a f*ck", Weiland spits on "Do It for the Kids", and a peel from Slash's arsenal backs him up. The sexy hard throb of early standout "Big Machine" is equally honest about the VR principals' ravages, timeline, and current intent. "Comic book lives don't really have any real life do they now?" The tracks of first person cynicism are up and down this Contraband, but Weiland and the Gunners are also ready to throw some elbows."You're the cancer/You're the leech.Don't let any of those f*ckers in my headspace".
Sonically, it's a little amazing how Contraband sounds pretty much like what you'd expect of such a collabo. "Sucker Train Blues" and "Spectacle" re-access G N' R's trademark muscularity even as Weiland's sideways mouth tumble and harmonizing preen are unmistakable, while "Headspace" and "Superhuman" switch it up, suggesting an STP pace.
Slash's explosive guitar entrance on "Set Me Free" gets the skin a-tingling like the old days, but he's not running a nostalgia show, so there are new tricks and sounds, too, and spars with second guitarist Dave Kushner. "Slither" is a hard orange gasoline drinker; it's "Big Bang Baby"'s cocaine cousin, the cool one in the family with no need for sleep and exploits you read about.
And yet, there's pain behind the excess. Contraband is constantly fighting and searching for a head-clearing open space. "Dirty Little Thing" finds a niche between excess and hope for something greater, while Contraband's slower detours - "Fall to Pieces", the gorgeous "Loving the Alien" - are painted in dusty reds and browns, like idealized fever dreams of desert escaping to the desert with the one you love.
With Contraband, Velvet Revolver has pulled off something tidy, fashioning music that manages both hedonism and maturity. It upholds legacies while grading a new route; it might even make the haters like Weiland. - Johnny Loftus
HersheyChron.com: by Todd Thatcher , Staff Writer 07/01/2004; Rating: 7 out of 10
The slow disintegration of the '90s alternative-rock scene left many member of the decade's biggest bands without an outfit to call their own.
And when solo efforts from former frontmen Chris Cornell of Soundgarden and Scott Weiland of Stone Temple Pilots were met with little fanfare by critics or rock fans, what were these former superstars in need of a career boost to do?
In the case of Audioslave, it was entering into the unlikely marriage between a singer-less Rage Against the Machine and the formidable pipes of Cornell. But while that band's self-titled debut spawned several hit songs and was certified double-platinum, at times, the union felt almost as unnatural in actuality as it did on paper.
Soon after that record hit stores, attention turned to three former members of Guns & Roses - Slash, Matt Sorum and Duff McKagan - who were embarking on a well-publicized hunt for a singer who could deliver a new album in less than a decade.
A lot of names were tossed around, but when Weiland finally got the job, the collaboration made a certain kind of sense. Weiland had the charismatic, often-flamboyant personality of Axl Rose, and he shared a common history of hard-partying and drug abuse with most of his new bandmates.
After much speculation and anticipation, the group - now dubbed Velvet Revolver - managed to deliver its debut record, Contraband, in a little over a year. So does this new collaboration live up to its members past glories?
Not quite, but it's dark, sleazy and it rocks, and that should do just fine for now. Contraband is the true successor to Guns & Roses Appetite for Destruction and STP's Core, both of which were followed by mellower, less-dangerous - but more ambitious - sequels.
Opener "Sucker Train Blues" fits that bill to a tee, pairing uptempo, drum-driven verses featuring trademark Slash guitar licks with a big, airy chorus reminiscent of mid-period STP. First single "Slither" - already a number-one hit - works the same angle, but distinguishes itself with a darker, more claustrophobic feel.
"Big Machine" is another standout with its crunchy, catchy hook and lyrics that are uncommonly straight-forward for Weiland. "We're all slaves to a big machine," the singer declares. "I got houses,/got cars./ I got a wife./ I got kids./ Hope I teach my son to be a man./ Now before he hits 35."
Unfortunately, good as those songs are, there's just too many others like them on this 13-track opus to classify Contraband as a true classic. By the time you get to songs like "Headspace" and "Dirty Little Thing," both fairly-generic rockers, the formula starts to wear a little thin.
Thankfully, there are a trio of fine ballads interspersed throughout Contraband that allow a few rays of sunshine into the darkness. "Fall to Pieces" builds from just stripped-down strumming and Weiland's intimate vocals into an 80's power-ballad chorus. Top it off with a nice solo, and you've got a solid (if slightly-formulaic) single contender.
"You Got No Right" and the Beatle-esque closer, "Loving the Alien," are more successful in expanding Velvet Revolver's sound. The former, with its loungy keyboards and soft-strummed acoustics, sounds like a natural extension of Shangri-La Dee Da-era STP. A closer look at its lyrics shows Weiland is still struggling with some of the demons that plagued him throughout that band's career - and wondering just how much longer his loved ones will continue to put up with him.
"And if I meet you out tonight/ Will you be loving me forever?" he asks. "It's always colder after the night./ I broken through the ice./ She won't be coming back again./ It's been a year and a night."
It's tracks like these that show Velvet Revolver - with Weiland at the head - are capable of becoming more than the sum of their parts. Given time to grow and explore all the inherent possibilities in its membership, VR could become a great group in their own right.
For now, Contraband stands as a solid rock record performed by musicians who can really play their instruments, and a singer with the skills and personality to pull it all off with seeming ease. It might not break any new ground, but music like this is sadly missing from today's music scene, so it's no wonder why hard rock fans have received Velvet Revolver with open arms.
Kerrang! Vice City- A Nightmare trip into the dark heart of LA with Slash and Scott Weiland
Rating: 4/5; Reviewer Matt Potter
The Lowdown: No, you first. What do you think it sounds like? Because for all the anonymous packaging and the "New group" Shtick, here you have former STP pincushion Scott Weiland fronting GNR refugees Slash, Duff McKagan and Matt Sorum. Plus some other guy. So hey, it's only natural that some folks are gonna call theis GNR Version 2.0. th eband know it too - Look at that name. Yes, a Revolver is a Gun, as in "Guns" - plus something all soft and romantic and girly - Roses... Velvet! See what they did there?
The good news is: this isn't a GNR tribute band. Okay, for the first few listens you'll be listening out for those tricksy, fluting "Sweet Child O'Mine" guitar patterns. But if this is a cash cow, they sure as hell hide it well. And as for Weiland, he might have chopped and snorted his credibility long ago, but - crucially - he sounds like a man consumed by the burning need to get it the fuck back. the result "Contraband" drips with the dark-hearted pissed-off-ness five californian millionaires - Okay, 4 millionaires and Dave Kushner - have no business knowing what to do with.
But they do. When it works - on "Big Machine" and single "Slither", say - its a fine, ugly thing thaht drags you right between the cracks into its own brutal netherworld, somehwere between LA and your worst nightmares. From the wailing sirens that usher in the opener "Sucker Train Blues", Contraband takes a sick gleeful joy in taking your memories of their past achievements, spiking their drinks and pushing them into the back of a seedy mini cab headed for the darker side of town.
Weiland is Master of Ceremonies here, playing a nasty little batard who rabbits bad news in your ear like a reptillian Joe Pesci conducting a guided tour of Dante's Hell AKA LA: It's all coke, comedowns and con artists. But in LA you take your troubles and face them on down. Which makes Contraband's ballads, notably "Fall To Pieces" and the Beatles-esque "You Got No Right" things of rare, cracked beauty.
The music is superb "Do It For The Kids" displays Contraband's dirty trick of penning you in with Slash's itchy, wise guy guitar before sending you reeling with a big long, rangy upper-cut chorus. "Big Machine", meanwhile, sees Weiland's multi layered vocal swaying like a rattler among the thick instrumental foilage. "All that first class jet shit is brings me down, down, down" he croons.. And you just know he'd be the worst person to sit next to on take off.
Fighters? Snakes? Demons? Crashes? No shit, sherlock. this is one pissed off little group - And they are just about done biding their time
Best tracks: "Big Machine" "Slither"
MSN Entertainment: (thanks to Dan Craik)
While Axl Rose is allegedly putting the finishing touches to Guns N' Roses' fabled Chinese Democracy album, the rest of the original members have formed their own supergroup.
Bassist Duff McKagan, drummer Matt Sorum and of course mop-haired guitarist Slash have teamed-up with Wasted Youth's Dave Kushner and, most tellingly, Stone Temple Pilots frontman Scott Weiland to produce the album GNR should've made ten years ago.
Big guitars, even bigger choruses, riff crazy tracks like Do It For The Kids and lightning quick Illegal i Song prove the guys have lost none of their Jack Daniels-laced aggression, while the anthemic Big Machine collides brilliantly close to GNR's You Could Be Mine. They also ooze that genuine rock n' roll edge that few bands can get away with but with Velvet Revolver, you get the feeling there's still something dangerous bubbling just beneath the surface.
MXDWN.com: Valor, Experience and Flare:
What do you get when Guns 'N Roses drop a bloated Axl Rose and Stone Temple Pilot's Scott Weiland finally decides to clean up and start singing again? Not only do you get an ecstatic group of fans, but the rockin', head-bangin' surge of Velvet Revolver.
"Contraband" is an appropriate title for the mish-mash group's debut album, as many of the songs deal with taboo issues. One of these issues primarily being Weiland's long-running spat with drug addiction. The album sounds like a mix of newly influential Indie Rock sound modes, [old] grungy Jane's Addiction, and a more pissed-off Stone Temple Pilots, all tempered with the Guns 'N Roses metal edge without the cheesy hair-band sound. The listeners also get to see a side of Weiland that's not usually shown. In songs such as "You Got No Right," and the humorously titled yet sweetly melodic "Loving the Alien," he sings in a rich, fluid voice with as much emotion as any singer has ever been able to muster. One of the most exciting tracks on the album is the last "hidden" track. This is a cover of punk forefathers Sex Pistols' "Bodies," put forth with as much energy as the Pistols in their prime.
Songs with such content as abortion, violence and drug abuse walk a fine line that is easily crossed. It takes a band with the valor to walk the line, the past experience of having walked it, and the flare to do it in an enjoyable manner to get their point across. Velvet Revolver is able to strut down that line with a fan base of millions to support their cause.
New Zealand Herald (thanks to Lana):
(Herald rating: * * *)
Complete with a seemingly focus-group spawned band name to remind they are three-fifths former Guns N' Roses to one-fifth Stone Temple Pilot, this debut by the hard rock supergroup should be hilarious. It should be a desperate last gasp from the arena rock rehab clinic.
Actually it's not half-bad.
The combination of STP singer Scott Weiland - a man who still seems to have "Bust me, I've got drugs" tattooed prominently about his person - and ex-Gunners Slash, Duff McKagan and Matt Sorum, along with ring-in Dave Kushner, seems to have made an album that is the sum of their parts.
As it glues some hefty tunes to all that riffage and Slash delivers yet another of his on-the-mountain-top solos (at best on Fall to Pieces), it is a fairly predictable set. But it's one of unflagging energy with producer Josh Abraham (the man who turned Shihad into Pacifier) giving it a loud pop sheen which should tempt many a rock radio programmer into taking the week off.
Unsurprisingly, Weiland's lyrics suggest something is forever gnawing away at his fragile psyche, poor dear.
Thankfully that's tempered by the same melodic gifts which made his old band STP occasionally tolerable. That's whether he's doing an Iggy on Do It For the Kids, lifting a bit of Pete Shelley's Homosapien on Big Machine, or doing Bowie-by-numbers on closing ballad Loving the Alien.
The backing suggests industrial-strength GN'R with occasional forays into Soundgarden territory on Headspace.
On the likes of Superhuman you do wonder what it might have sounded like had Axl Rose's feral howl been in there instead.
Worse probably.
It's dated and desperately uncool, but it's still a Class A LA rock album.
Rolling Stone Magazine: 4 stars
Before you start cracking wise about out-of-work refugees from multiplatinum bands or rock stars with drug problems and arrest records -- as if we haven't seen a few of them in the last half-century -- consider this: Singer Scott Weiland, late of Stone Temple Pilots, and the ex-Guns n' Roses trio of guitarist Slash, bassist Duff McKagan and drummer Matt Sorum have, with second guitarist Dave Kushner, gotten more done in one year as Velvet Revolver than Axl Rose has achieved with his version of G n' R in the past decade. If nothing else, banging your head to Contraband's snarling update of Eighties Sunset Strip rock classicism is a lot better than laying around waiting for the mythical Chinese Democracy.
Contraband is, in fact, tighter and hotter in construction and attack than we had any right to expect from a band that started out auditioning vocalists while being filmed for a VH1 reality show. Weiland and the emeritus Gunners are not shy about flashing pedigree: "Sucker Train Blues" opens the album with zooming-underwater bass, pneumatic gallop and flying chunks of superfuzz guitar -- Appetite for Destruction in miniature -- while Weiland pulls out his police-bullhorn-style bark from STP's "Sex Type Thing." But the chorus harmonies are closer to dirty Def Leppard, and Weiland's searing, monotonic chant - more evil monk than howling wolf - takes you right to the center of his very public hell: "Brain and body melting while there's roaches multiplying/It's the alien infection, it's the coming of Christ." For a guy routinely lampooned as a walking rehab failure, Weiland nails the sweet selfish oblivion and dumb-ass self-destruction of addiction with explosive clarity and no jive excuses.
The déjèvu keeps on comin' throughout the next twelve tracks: Slash's high, strangled fills in "Do It for the Kids" and his reprise of the soprano-hiccup lick from "Sweet Child o' Mine" in "Fall to Pieces"; the tumbling growl of McKagan's bass and Sorum's hammering pulse in "Big Machine"; the full-on Stone Temple Roses of "Slither." But whereas Axl Rose now runs a G n' R that plays the old numbers like a repertory orchestra - and not enough of Democracy to prove that the album even exists -- Velvet Revolver energize their combined histories with original snort (the skewed skittering riff in "Set Me Free") and punchy vocal choruses. Weiland, in particular, shows that he is far more than the sum of his court appearances and star-crossed years with STP. His grainy yowl -- which, at the height of Seattle rock, earned Weiland a lot of lazy, cruel comparisons to Eddie Vedder -- is actually a precision instrument that cuts through Slash and Kushner's dense crossfire with a steely melodic purpose that, when Weiland piles up the harmonies in the choruses, sounds like sour, seething Queen.
Personally, I don't have a lot of patience for power ballads -- they are invariably more sap than nectar -- and Contraband stumbles when the tempo slows and Weiland switches from buggin' out to soft beggin'. And, yes, if I had my way, we'd be getting a real G n' R follow-up to the Use Your Illusion twins, and STP would now be making good on the interrupted promise of their recent best-of, Thank You. But we have Contraband instead, and it is a rare, fine thing: the sound of the perfect A&R sales pitch turning into a real band. Now we find out if these guys can stay together, and go somewhere new.
DAVID FRICKE
