Contraband

Let’s be honest, as a band name, ‘Velvet Revolver’ has a rather naff, nineties ring to it. What to expect from a super-group whose principal players had their heyday over ten years ago (and, more importantly, spent the ensuing years dodging drunk tanks and rehab facilities all over America)? Normally, super-groups are a curious breed of band, and are often best avoided. Velvet Revolver, mercifully, are anything but ‘after-the-fact’.
The taut opening of the album, ‘Sucker Train Blues’, suggests that Velvet Revolver’s sound is as vital as any of the young rock bucks out there right now. That is not to say that all the hallmarks of their previous incarnations are not firmly in place; anyone expecting Guns’n’Pilots Mark II will not come away disappointed. After all, Velvet Revolver gives Slash, Duff McKagan and Scott Weiland the chance to relive their former glories, which in all likelihood, they aren’t allowed to do at home because the babies are sleeping.
The album is a picture-perfect paean to all that was/is great about Sunset Strip cock-rock. Though accomplished, ‘Contraband’ is wholly uncouth and excessive; a rabid, bollock-licking dog of an album. ‘Fall To Pieces’ is driven with Slash’s soaring Flying-V solo, and ‘Headspace’ drags its knuckles across the recording studio floor.
Strangely enough, the album is a strange reflection on the turbulent times in which it was created. Weiland, for example, narrowly escaped jail upon signing up to the project, and boy, does it show on ‘Illegal i Song’.
Displaying more balls than Old Trafford on a Saturday afternoon, Velvet Revolver’s music is much more than the sum of its parts – and that’s saying something.