Artist: Duff McKagan's Loaded
Label: Century Media
Release: 2009
Length: 49.50
Rating: 2/5
Duff McKagan’s Loaded have recently gone back into orbit with an album of fresh blooms that is basically just a pale upgrade of a punk toolkit we’ve heard a million times already. Sick is a record of countless sloppily thrown-together musical influences, the ones that at one point or another on Duff’s life journey pushed the lad into way-too-early ejaculation. Predictably, the album doesn’t lack untamed punk rock urges, piled up into what looks like enormous destructive potential at first glance, but which has next to no effect worth mentioning!
Deep in Duff’s subconscious it’s mostly admiration for punk and its archaic currents smoldering away, the stuff that’s been tossing the lad around ever since his early Guns N’ Roses days. However you slice it, punk was and always will be one of the key elements of Duff’s clunky means of expression. That’s where the flirting with the temperament of the great idols The Stoogies comes from, and you can feel it on Sick practically from the first uncompromising blows of the title opener onward. The red thread running through the album is one kind of reliving or another of punk revolts set off in the distant past. And if anything, there’s certainly no shortage of nostalgia on Sick. The Slide very likely inherited the psychophysical defects of The Damned classic New Rose on purpose, while No More seems like it just clumsily morphed out of some especially nasty Fear shenanigans. Within the narrow frame of this well-known concept, Duff’s crew also serve up a few not exactly convincing attempts at flirting with melodically more demanding motifs, where IOU and Mothers Day crash and burn fast. Besides the fact that Duff is nowhere near grown into the role of a prolific musician with clearly set goals and vision, his problem, on top of all the other traits of absurd teenage rowdiness, also lies in the vocals. He never really belonged in the category of musicians with enviable vocal maneuvering skills, and on top of that the lad’s voice in 2009 is still stripped of any real character, so chirping over classic heavy rock-clad motifs gives him no small amount of trouble, at least when it comes to sounding convincing. The attempts at more mature and slightly more thought-out songwriting, which the soul-crushing series of botch jobs Blind Date Girl, No Shame and Wasted Heart is reaching for, thus hack away at the already impoverished palette of noteworthy moments Sick has to offer.
If there’s no unstoppable urge burning in your shapely little body to gorge on quasi-punk racket, you’ll walk right past Sick without so much as a psychosomatic tremor, even if you belong to the incorrigible worshippers of the “guns and roses” family. That’s just how it is: a radical change of mindset that would stretch the creative vocabulary of 45-year-old McKagan even a little is obviously not something you can bet on just yet. Either way, Duff McKagan could have burned through the surplus of free time the old man’s got on his hands, under the guise of recruiting a fresh and more obedient Velvet Revolver vocalist, in some more productive way!
Line-up
Duff McKagan: vocals, guitar
Mike Squires: guitar
Jeff Rouse: bass
Geoff Reading: drums, backing vocals
Production
Duff McKagan
Track list
1. Sick
2. Sleaze Factory
3. Flatline
4. IOU
5. The Slide
6. Translucent
7. Mothers Day
8. I See Through You
9. Forgive Me
10. No Shame
11. Blind Date Girl
12. Wasted Heart
13. No More
