This terrific concert happened exactly a year ago, 9/25/14, and it is a revelation. Opening with “Ghost,” the splendid first cut from Slash’s 2010 solo disc (with the Cult’s Ian Asbury on vocals for that release,) here it unfolds like a hard rock version of Roxy Music’s classic “Manifesto,” plodding as the intensity builds. With Myles Kennedy on vocals, Frank Sidoris on guitar and vocals, Todd kerns on bass/vocals and drummer Brent Fitz along with Slash the entire CD disc is brimming with energy.
“Nightrain” follows with its descending guitar riff and in the pocket crunch. “Bent To Fly” is more elegant, shifting the gears with a kind of liquid guitar elegance with sentiment that would make Mott The Hoople’s Ian Hunter happy. The entire concert was actually satellite cast (can’t say ‘broadcast’ anymore with cable, internet, the bird, etc.) on Direct TV, and that’s a good thing. With such a glut of audio and video blitzing the world these days, music this good can’t and shouldn’t get lost in the shuffle.
“World on Fire” snarls like the “beautiful disaster” it defines, the four piece band and vocalist rocking out with precision and determination. Touring with Aerosmith earlier in the year (2014), Slash rocked out on “Mama Kin” and “Train Kept A Rollin” (with Johnny Depp as well, in town filming Black Mass) on July 16, 2014 at the old Great Woods in Mansfield, Massachusetts, and proved there, as he does on this disc, that Slash is one of the great, last standing rock stars who still has an axe to grind, and who is grinding it in unique and explosive ways.
Joe Viglione is the Chief Film Critic at TMRZoo.com. He has written thousands of reviews and biographies for AllMovie.com, Allmusic.com, Gatehouse Media, Al Aronowitz’s The Blacklisted Journal, and a variety of other media outlets. Joe also produces and hosts Visual Radio, a seventeen year old variety show on cable TV which has interviewed Jodie Foster, director/screenwriter David Koepp, Michael Moore, John Cena, comics/actors Margaret Cho, Gilbert Gottfried, Gallagher, musicians Mark Farner and Don Brewer of Grand Funk Railroad, Ian Hunter of Mott The Hoople, Ray Manzarek, John Densmore, Felix Cavaliere of The Rascals, political commentator Bill Press and hundreds of other personalities.
