Daily Listen by Brian Brock

Hm.  There’s no songs.  Axl Rose spent 15 years working on nothing.  It’s not hard to do, really.  You make some little thing of no consequence.  You want to hear what it sounds like, so you record it.  Listening, you think of another part or two that you can just put in there, so you add.  You add.  At some point, you develop a sentimental attachment to the work invested in the thing, and you’re stuck.

To put a finer point on it, there are no hooks.  Anyone who has enjoyed some Guns N’ Roses music will think of it and instantly hear:

“ah ah ah ah sweet child o’ mine”,

“take me down to the paradise city where the grass is green and the girls are pretty”,

“in the jungle, welcome to the jungle, watch it bring you to your knees, knees, I wanna watch you bleed”,

maybe “all we need is just a little patience”.

These combinations of lyric and melody are devastatingly effective and form entirely new, permanent neural pathways which in turn shape people’s lives.  This album has one song with a hook, “Catcher in the Rye”, but it’s the sort of thing a GNR (!) fan might write as an assignment in Language Arts II.

Buckethead, unfortunately, has no place at all on a Guns N’ Roses album.  He only does what is fun for himself, while Axl Rose and everything else about the band is married to self-seriousness.  With roles reversed, they could have something interesting.  Rose would be constrained from spiralling out into the piano-plucking stratospheres of gloom, and he could take Buckethead beyond his usual pretend intensity.  But here, in this context Buckethead’s wowee-zowee fiddly-diddlies are just one more bit of excess for Rose to play with.

I would love to see some incarnation of Guns and Roses come back with another album in 8 months or so - that could be interesting.