Comment Corner

Folks, good hard rock is both good and hard to find these days. Too many bands became soft-ass dickmunches to appeal to women rather than keeping rock hard, fast and drug-fueled. Bryan Adams used to have a dick. Then, Bryan Adams wrote one song, just one lousy fucking song, for Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves and instantly his dick turned into a lute. Gone was the Summer of '69 and in came '69ing mass-market appeal at the expense of being a total douchbag.
Fuck, listen to the radio these days and unless you're listening to a classic rock station, you're going to run smack-dab into a horrible mix of pre-selected computerized rhythm machines, melodies which consist of some douchy glockenspiel (Akon, I'm looking directly your way) and horseshit lyrics pulled straight out of the sequestered bathroom shitter reserved for the retarded kids with grumpy bowels. You remember that bathroom, it was always off limits and smelled of vanilla.

Harken forward to today, the wasteland of rock. Not the last ditch stand that was the grungy '90s anymore, two bands survived the pukey R&B 'Nsync purge of the late 90's, early 00's, sort of. The Stone Temple Pilots, a fucking awesome band, disbanded due to Scott Weiland's incorrigible and aggressive tendency to shoot as much heroin as he could possibly lay his hands on. When he's banging more heroin out of his vein than is going in, you've got yourself a really bad horse problem. That said, he's survived and went on to join the always clean and good influence Slash from Guns 'n Roses to form Velvet Revolver.

Velvet Revolver released their first album Contraband and instantly, testicles started to drop in people the continent over. Suddenly, there was a glimmer of remembrance of people when three guitars slashing to a real live drum-set meant music you could blare out the window of a 1970's Camaro with some pride.

After the hideous decision on the part of Chris Cornell to disband Soundgarden, he made up for it by forming Audioslave. But, earlier this year, he once again made the decision to venture out on his own. The last time he did that, he released the gay-pride parade that was Euphoria Morning. It blew. It blew bad. It was as though he wanted people to kill him just so they could piss on his gravestone.

However, Chris Cornell fired up his alcoholism and wrote "You Know My Name" for Casino Royale. Suddenly, James Bond mattered again. You didn't need some slow weird ballad a la Garbage or bizarre dance mix a la Madonna (Sigmund Freud, Sigmund Freud? Fuck you Madge), you could blast people's nuts up their bodies into their mouths where they could taste the manliness of the song. It was a delicious thick steak in a world musically turned towards omega-3 soy-burgers.

So, with the two above selections releasing new albums, I got excited. 2007 would be the Summer of Rock...or would it?

LIBERTAD



Thankfully, Scott Weiland and Slash get what an album should be. Libertad is to Velvet Revolver what Purple was to the Stone Temple Pilots or what the untitled Collective Soul album was to Collective Soul, y'know, the good one with Gel. This album fucking moves. It's got battle-axe riffs, pounding drums, Weiland sounds much more like he did on Core and Purple than he did in the hit and miss Tiny Music, Shangriladeeda or 4. Two of the ballads don't really work although Gravedancer didn't bog the album down. Otherwise, Velvet Revolver managed to refine their sound, making it fresh and familiar at the same time. Once again, see my comparisons above.

The first single "She Builds Quick Machines" is available for free listening at www.velvetrevolver.com, if you like that song, you'll love the album.

Libertad works, buy this album.

CARRY ON



I wanted to like Carry On. Soundgarden won the Comment Corner Best Fucking Band Ever Award for a reason. Cornell can write songs using the unique and awesome 7/5 time signature. "You Know My Name" gave me a raging hard-on although Arctic_Menance did ask for a reduction in self-referential boner talk so we'll say no more. But, if you're curious, it was 2' long and purple.

The first single, "No Such Thing" was classic Soundgardeny rock. Cornell gets off a thunderous scream, the guitars don't let up during the hand-grenade chorus and it easily could have been a forgotten song from Soundgarden's best album, Superunknown. The next few songs are good, but they're not rock. This album was a disappointment for me in the sense that based upon the two available singles from it, I was expecting all-rock, all the time. But Cornell surprised me. He essentially made a blues album in the vein of Miles Davis. Except for Your Soul Today and Billie Jean (a classic bad mistake of a choice), the album is presented as though Cornell is a gifted singer picking his selections from the American songbook.

It's not rock the way you'd want rock, but it's rock drenched in it's soulful origins. Ultimately, it's a great album to which one can listen, but it certainly isn't the machine gun album tha Libertad is.

In summation (and as a possible ending!), Libertad is the better album. But both albums are far and away better than the shit you were listening to, especially if it was mixed by unique but now overused and boring Timbaland.

TRANSFORMERS SPOILER

Transformers kicked ass. Everybody in the crowd loved it. Go see the film and marvel at how GM finally made a healthy decision for once in its ass-kicked life.

My only beef was Megatron dying at the hands of Sam Witwicky with the All-Spark. Had I been director, Megatron would have barely survived the attack and been air-lifted out by Starscream, only to have Starscream betray Megatron and kill him to become leader of the Decepticons. As is, Starscream isn't portrayed as the back-stabbing bitch from the TV show, more like a flying menace.