Sunday, September 30, 2007
A+E, Music, Reviews

Velvet Revolver

“Libertad” (RCA)

 Scott Weiland of Velvet Revolver
CREDIT: Ethan Miller/Getty Images

VELVET REVOLVER
w/Alice in Chains and Sparta
Wednesday, Oct. 3
HiFi Buys Amphitheatre
$30–$60
404-249-6400
www.livenation.com

Hard rock, at least the hedonist, scuzzy, sex, drugs and debauchery kind, is a young man’s game. That doesn’t mean middle agers can’t compete—see Prince’s Super Bowl halftime act for proof—just that they need to alter their approach as the waistbands widen and the hair starts thinning.

Which brings us to Velvet Revolver, a band whose members—all 40 or older—will eternally be trapped in the shadow of their glory days with Guns N’ Roses and Stone Temple Pilots. The band owns up to its advancing years on some of its sophomore release, while capturing the decadent swagger of a scene they are too old to effectively recreate.

Producer Brendan O’Brien, who has worked with Pearl Jam, Bruce Springsteen and the Stone Temple Pilots, deftly fashions a mature sonic palette that maintains some of the stank of the members’ slowly fading youth. The sexed up “Mary Mary” (“got a fever, fever, fever in your thighs”) is balanced by the relatively introspective lyrics of “Pills, Demons & Etc” (you got the skills, you got the pills, you’re getting older, you’ve got the weight of all its left you on your shoulder”).

Velvet Revolver rocks with conviction throughout, even if the songs aren’t terribly memorable. A lumbering cover of ELO’s “Can’t Get it Out of My Head” should have remained a B side—ditto for the closing “hidden” country tune—but otherwise this is a moderately enjoyable, if somewhat forgettable, set. It succeeds when it doesn’t try too hard to sound like what it is—crusty veterans trying to maintain respectability in a genre where youth isn’t just preferable, it’s a necessity. TWO AND A HALF STARS —Hal Horowitz