Album: Velvet Revolver

Contraband, RCA

While the rest of the world - well, his mum anyway - waits with bated breath for Axl Rose to buckle down and finish the new line-up Guns N' Roses album he has supposedly been working on these past few years, his old bandmates have gone and done what all washed-up rockers should, which is form a supergroup with other washed-up rockers. Velvet Revolver is Slash, Duff McKagan and Matt Sorum from GN'R, the ex-Stone Temple Pilots vocalist Scott Weiland, and one Dave Kushner from the Electric Love Hogs. OK, so they're only 80 per cent super, but who's counting when the results are as laughable as Contraband, an album almost as hackneyed and retro, in attitude at least, as Permission to Land? I've no real complaints about Slash, who does his guitar thing well enough; and the band's blend of piquantly melodic bulldozer rock riffs topped with banked vocal harmonies is certainly no worse than any of the Korns, Tools and Creeds that populate the genre. But Weiland's idea of a decent lyric seems to

While the rest of the world - well, his mum anyway - waits with bated breath for Axl Rose to buckle down and finish the new line-up Guns N' Roses album he has supposedly been working on these past few years, his old bandmates have gone and done what all washed-up rockers should, which is form a supergroup with other washed-up rockers. Velvet Revolver is Slash, Duff McKagan and Matt Sorum from GN'R, the ex-Stone Temple Pilots vocalist Scott Weiland, and one Dave Kushner from the Electric Love Hogs. OK, so they're only 80 per cent super, but who's counting when the results are as laughable as Contraband, an album almost as hackneyed and retro, in attitude at least, as Permission to Land? I've no real complaints about Slash, who does his guitar thing well enough; and the band's blend of piquantly melodic bulldozer rock riffs topped with banked vocal harmonies is certainly no worse than any of the Korns, Tools and Creeds that populate the genre. But Weiland's idea of a decent lyric seems to be either a load of bogus whinging about how put-upon he is, or, alternatively, a wearying private language full of oh-so-sleazy lines such as "Rocket bitch is blasting off" and "Somebody raped my tapeworm abortion".