Slash featuring Myles Kennedy & The Conspirators

Slash (aka Saul Hudson) is perhaps the most recognisable guitarist working in the heavy rock/metal genres today. His name is everywhere it seems, a signature he lends to countless guitars in shops around the globe. And while he made his name with the insanely successful Guns’n’Roses, he’s managed to stay in the public eye largely because he truly loves his rock’n’roll and just loves to play, wherever and whenever, whether it’s with famous mates Motorhead, Ozzy Osborne, Dave Grohl or any number of lesser known musicians. If he ain’t with these people, he’s playing on his own, always working on new riffs and ideas.

Creatively though, he’s suffered a little bit since the GnR days – his first ‘solo’ album was a lacklustre collaboration with all sorts of musical celebrities while follow up album Apocalyptic Love was too much of a Slash-and-the-others type affair. Now, with World on Fire, he’s fully reverted back to what made him tick in the first place; that is being in a band, plain and simple, with no real leaders, just a collection of guys who love nothing more than to rock out, but crucially to take part in the process of ‘making’ rock’n’roll music, as a democracy, more or less. With Myles Kennedy and the backbone of Todd Kerns and Brent Fitz (aka The Conspirators) he has done just that, the bass and drums a more integral part of the set-up than before.

Furthermore, he’s gone back to making music via tape – which has resulted in a warmer, more ‘live’ feel to the album, and has become the only guitarist in the group, working his black socks off on every track. Here, there are more riffs than beans in a tin, plus plenty of rhythmic textures throughout. On the previous album Myles Kennedy played some guitar as well as sang (he is no mug on the six string), but here he concentrates almost exclusively on lyrics and voice, the result being that Slash is able to stamp is indelible mark on proceedings, guitar-wise, while letting the others do what they do best. So, yes, there are guitar overdubs everywhere, but the result is a more complete, more satisfying and better sounding album. And Slash, as always, never over indulges in cliqued riffing; he knows when to start and when to stop.

From the dynamite, choppy rhythmic leads – a la Motorhead – of the title track to Wicked Stone’s superbly dirty grunge bass/guitar onslaught, there are classic hard rock gems a-plenty. It certainly ain’t forward thinking, nor musically adventurous – naming the year of this record would be a fun game, any year between 1990 and 2014 I would hazard – and World On Fire is too long, clocking in at just under 80 minutes, the hard rock barrage barely letting up. But when it does a little – tracks like Withered Delilah and The Dissident (which provides the only real comic moment as the song begins its life as a crackly recorded-in-the-field old timey parody) – the more melodic light that this affords is a relief, and perhaps should be explored more in future.

At the end of the day Slash likes to get his rocks off, nothing fancy or complex, just hands-to-the-pump hard rock.