Well, here’s a tough sell. How do you compile a greatest hits album for a band that only has one arguable “hit?” And furthermore, how do you sell a compilation album when a band’s core demographic are fanatic completists who most likely buy every single item ever issued by the band? There aren’t many casual Dream Theater fans, and it’s not like someone’s going to hear one of their songs on the local hot-100 radio station and rush out to buy this. So is it worth the $15 to buy this?

Well, maybe. This compilation includes two discs: a “dark side” of heavier metal numbers, and a “light side” of the more melodic songs. It’s an interesting way to group things, with the down side that I never realized Dream Theater recorded so damn many ballady songs until they were all presented back-to-back. At any rate, you get 22 tracks, which is a pretty decent value for $15. Plus you maintain continuity in owning every one of the band’s releases, which might calm the OCD demons in your head if you suffer from the “must have every release” syndrome.

And there are a few kinda-new things here. First, there’s “To Live Forever”, a B-Side from the “Lie” single. That wasn’t on any studio album; that’s also as far as you get with regard to original stuff. You also have a lot of remixes and radio edits and slightly different tracks. And three of the tracks from Images and Words are remastered. This is a big deal to some, because the original mix used a snare trigger throughout, and many a fanboy bitched and moaned about the production. Now, those three songs are mixed with a real snare. Unfortunately, after almost two decades of hearing the triggered snare, the regular one sounds weird to me. The remix does bring out some of the other percussion sound though, and the sax on “Another Day” sounds pretty crisp, too.

There’s not much else to say here. It’s a good grouping of songs, but it might not be an essential purchase to you, especially if you have other albums to catch up on. I don’t like greatest hits albums in general, but this isn’t bad.

Rating: 6

When an album is in the making for almost two decades, and the band goes through an almost 100% lineup change, serious questions emerge about the final product. And this means that most reviews of said product aren’t about the production or if the songs groove, but rather ask a million questions about what the hell happened. And that’s why two major questions clog the beginning of this review: did such a long wait damage or distress this work? And, is this even Guns N’ Roses?

For those not familiar with the chronology (maybe because you were born after their last album came out, which is entirely possible), The Spaghetti Incident? came out in November of 1993. This half-baked collection of covers and old punk tunes did contain Slash for the last time, but it also didn’t do well sales-wise, caused tension in the band, and generally flew under a lot of people’s radar. There was also a 1999 release of live recordings from 1987-1993, featuring the old lineup. But if you’re talking about originals, the last real release by the band was 1991’s Use Your Illusion albums. That’s a 17-year gap, and a lot has happened in the last 17 years.

Could a heavy metal band take a few decades off and come back with anything relevant? If you’ve listened to recent albums by any of the old monsters of rock from the 80s, it’s generally a disappointment. You typically get a retread of the simplest 80s hard rock, with a thin veneer of industri-synth beats and samples duct-taped over the gaps. GNR also dominated in a world with larger sales across fewer genres. When I was in high school and college, everyone was a GNR fan to some extent, from the preppies to the motorheads. It was not uncommon for people in my high school to be fans of New Kids on the Block and Guns N’ Roses. Now, music is so segmented and divided by the mass number of channels available for sales; people go to iTunes and buy the one song they like (or steal it). There’s no need to go to a record store and buy from their limited selection of displayed albums, which are put out by major labels and competed for shelf space in a system just short of collusion. Now there’s more of everything, but you get lost in that sea of everything, and a band like Guns N’ Roses isn’t going to pull a “Sweet Child” coup and go wall-to-wall with mass FM radioplay and MTV exposure. If they’re lucky, they’ll get a song on an obscure XM radio show that only metalheads listen to, and maybe maybe a ten second clip of a guitar solo will be used when some d-list skateboard dude trashes a grocery store on a reality TV show.

I have to say I was pleasantly surprised by the freshness of this album. I thought maybe Axl started writing back in 1996 or 1997, and started with something akin to an old dude’s Korn, and then attempted to pig-lipstick the thing with a series of session dudes and fancy studio tricks. Then in 2008, it would sound like when a show like CSI has to have music at a heavy metal club (“ripped from the headlines”) and they hire four studio musicians/actors, dress them up in Hot Topic, and make them play a network executive’s idea of what down-and-dirty metal sounds like.

But that didn’t happen! First, the production is over the top good. Yes, given a decade of knob-twirling, it should be. But it sounds absolutely excellent. And it has a lot of riffage that gives it the feel of a hip, new metal sound. Without going into specifics right now, they do a lot of extremely impressive guitar solo work everywhere. It has this “dirty New York slum metal” sound, for lack of a better term. And the laid-on industrial bits and samples are nowhere near as bad or involved as I’d thought. There was a track on an Ahnold movie soundtrack a few years ago (titled “Oh my God”) that was very NiN-esque, but that isn’t on this album, and there isn’t anything approaching it. That’s good, because pretty much everyone hated that track, and it’s good that Rose didn’t continue in that vein.

Now, about the lineup issue. Of course, Slash left, along with Duff McCagan. That means every “original” member of the band except Axl had left, although late-replacement Dizzy Reed, remained on keys. The rotating door of guitar was held by Tommy Stinson and Robin Finck, with other key members including Buckethead, Bumblefoot, and Paul Tobias. (The actual personnel list is far too complicated to summarize, but there’s a wikipedia article out there with a giant chart explaining it. Seriously, the leadership of the Italian government over the last century is easier to explain.)

What this means though, is this could be considered an Axl Rose album, with a cast of dozens and the legal possession of the name of the band. And that radically changes the dynamics of the thing, because this kind of metal isn’t just a collection of music as much as it is a lifestyle, and a group’s collectiveness. The Rolling Stones would not be The Rolling Stones if the Mick/Keith combination was Mick Jagger and a half-dozen of whatever hotshit guitarists were looking for work at the time the album was recorded. Even if the guitarists were technically better than Keith Richards, the idea that you have these two musicians angling for the head spot in the band adds to the tension and ultimately the personality of the band. If you replace Slash with a dozen session musicians, it isn’t a band as much as it is a project. And despite the fact that there’s some incredible guitar work on this album, that’s the big issue here.

Another complaint is that there aren’t any songs on this album that “rock” from start to finish. There’s not a lot of consistent verse/chorus/verse “Mr. Brownstone” songs that work within the construct of a standard rock song without going off onto a strange tangent. The structures are more complicated, which are impressive, but it means the songs aren’t as accessible. That said, it isn’t like Rose bought a bunch of Yes and King Crimson records and went off writing odd-meter, 24-minute compositions. But as an example of this weirdness: in “Sheckler’s Revenge”, it starts sort of slow and dark, and about 40 seconds in, there’s what could best be described as a “disco hustle beat.” But within a dozen seconds, it swaps for a huge metal chorus riff with screaming, fret-tapping guitar. This odd arrangement is repeated again, and I wouldn’t doubt it if the same section was copied and pasted in whatever multimillion-dollar version of ProTools is used in the studio. If I was producing this song, I’d swap out the weird disco part and put in something that matched parts A and C, and then used different solo parts to make it more of a straightforward rock song. And you’d think in a dozen years, someone else would have thought of that, and maybe it was recorded a hundred times the way I described, but that’s not what you get.

The album as a whole is very ballady, and much more like the Illusion albums, especially in the sense that both of the 1991 albums could have been trimmed into one kick-ass CD with half the tracks left on the floor or sent to the Japanese market as B-sides. Chinese is like that, in that half of it completely clicks, and the other half is filled with WTF moments and didn’t resonate. Unfortunately, this isn’t on a song-by-song basis. In 1991, it was easy to make a mix tape and exclude “Get in the Ring”; with 2008’s release, I can’t trim out the grating “Now I know you” verse in “Better” that sounds like it doesn’t belong. Same thing with “There Was a Time” and its repetitive “It was the wrong time for you” pre-chorus bit that’s like hearing your annoying neighbor say “Where’s the beef” for the thousandth time, decades after any relevancy.

Axl’s vocals are impressive, but it worries me that he’ll blow out his voice within the first three shows of a tour (which will inevitably cause a full-scale riot with a death count comparable to a mid-sized aviation disaster.) Add to this the fact that any given part of this album is at least 128 tracks of sound laid on top of each other, some of them multiple vocal tracks from Rose, which won’t work at all live. If any band should take a page from the Beatles’ playbook and never play live again, GNR would be a great candidate. Besides, even after perfecting these 17 cuts, when they hit the road, everyone’s only going to want to hear “Sweet Child” anyway. And while Axl does some impressive work, there are other parts where he tries too hard. The screaming at the start of “Scraped” sounds like Rose is being anally raped, which is slightly off-putting.

The one thing I can say about the album is that it has the same haunting quality as Illusion that makes it easy to listen to it repeatedly. Maybe it’s that all of the songs have to do with that vague interpersonal struggle mixed with inner self-doubt and depression that made me listen to the double albums nonstop back in college. Or maybe that weird mix of not-rock structure keeps it fresh or burns it into my brain. Either way, after I get past all of the political issues behind this album, I did really enjoy it, and at the end of the day, I think it will be an album I will put in ten years from now and get instantly transported back to 2008, which always earns high marks in my book.

Rating: 9

Ugh. For Rush’s sophomore effort on Atlantic records, they slid further into mediocrity with more standard hard rock numbers, an unusually bright and bland production, and a general lack of noteworthiness that got them an album that somehow peaked at #3 on the Billboard 200, but failed to do anything interesting musically.

Let’s face it: at this point, Rush stopped selling mass numbers of albums because they were interesting or good, and managed to sell a lot of records because they were Rush records. I’m sure there are many people who would argue that this was the greatest stuff ever, but I’m not one of them. However, there are plenty of completists that will buy anything released by Rush without question.

I won’t deny that the trio was still trying new things and attempting to progress musically. If you look at the albums between Hold Your Fire and Counterparts, there’s sort of a bell curve of writing style where the band wavers, overcorrects, and eventually drops into a good groove. Fortunately, that means Counterparts is excellent. Unfortunately, that means there are many missteps along the way.

One interesting example is an instrumental track, “Where’s My Thing?, Pt. 4: Gangster of Boats Trilogy.” It’s great that the band dipped back to their prog roots and decided to do their first instrumental track since “YYZ.” Unfortunately, it’s a synth-laden, fake-brassy track that’s doesn’t stand out as a feat of technical prowess. Most of the album has the same dynamic; things aren’t catchy, and songs blur into each other, with none of them standing out. The only ultimately memorable songs to me are the opener, “Dreamline,” which has a catchy chorus, and “Heresy,” which is Rush’s “the wall fell down” song (which was a big fad of the time. I blame The Scorpions for this didn’t-age-well trend.)

And then there’s the title track. And the rap. Geddy Lee raps. I don’t even know how to process this. A RAP. Jesus H. Christ on a cross - I mean, I have nothing against rap, and I even own a few records of the genre and can enjoy them, but this is like when your parents try to act cool and learn like one word of youth slang and then use it incorrectly to gain some kind of cred with you. I wish I could just pretend this whole album never happened.

Anyway, I have a minor conspiracy theory about how such a shoddy album could chart so well: RTB was the first Rush release in the Nielsen SoundScan era. Prior to SoundScan’s adoption on March 1, 1991, the weekly Billboard 200 chart was assembled together from vague statistics reported manually by store owners based on inventory changes and normalized with secretive statistical voodoo. But starting in May of 1991, actual barcode scans in stores with computerized point-of-sale systems were directly used to measure performance on Billboard charts.

This led to a strange shift; instead of being based on a weighting of store owners’ perceived sales figures, they were based on actual sales figures. This meant that some albums that you wouldn’t think were chartable would show up and rate high. The first #1 album on the post-SoundScan Billboard 200 was a Michael Bolton album. Heavy metal albums, which traditionally were not well-reported, suddenly tore up the charts. Skid Row’s second album, Slave to the Grind, entered the charts at #1, and then rapidly fell back off, because a surge of people bought it during a single week. And remember when Guns ‘N Roses had the big Use Your Illusion midnight purchase rush? Actually, pretty much every big band started having those Tuesday night come-in-at-midnight store events, mostly because it was a good way to juice SoundScan stats. (It was also a good way to get people to line up to buy a crappy Guns ‘N Roses album of cover tunes, but that’s another review.)

Amazon and iTunes have similar rating systems, in which titles with large purchase numbers at very specific time periods skew statistics. A perfect example of this in 2008 was when Stephen Colbert urged all of his fans to buy his Christmas album on iTunes at one specific time. This threw off the system and unseated a much larger-selling Kanye West album from the top position. So when you have a band with tons of loyal fans that all rush out at midnight on a certain day to buy the band’s new album sight unseen, it just might chart very well, even if it sucked total shit and had Geddy Lee doing a god damned rap in one song.

I remember this album coming out, and being excited that a new Rush song was on the radio, but I didn’t hurry to the record store and wait in line all night for this one. In fact, I think I listened to it once at a record store and decided to pass on it. Much later, I picked up a used copy, listened to it a few times, and must have sold it back, because I had to go out and buy another copy on iTunes to write this review. Maybe the reason I never got into this album, aside from its contents, was that so much else was going on at that point in music. A ton of excellent metal albums came out around then (Entombed - Clandestine; Carcass - Necroticism…; Death - Human; Motorhead - 1916) and this got lost in the shuffle.

Rating: 4

MARS stands for MacAlpine Aldridge Rock Sarzo, and it’s a fine little example of only-in-the-Eighties guitar rock, courtesy of Shrapnel records. They’re best known as the small indie label that put out guitar super-genius Tony MacAlpine’s first album out to rave reviews. In 1986, they gave him a shot to do something different and put together a “super-group,” playing some more rock-oriented tunes, rather than his instrumental and highly progressive guitar-oriented stuff. He rounded out the band with Ozzy drummer Tommy Aldridge and Quiet Riot bassist Rudy Sarzo, as well as the somewhat unknown crooner Robert Rock. (And no, it’s not that Bob Rock.)

Turns out this lineup happened almost at the last minute. The band was simply called Driver at first, and Craig Goldy was the original guitar player, but he left the band to go play with Ronnie James Dio. Sarzo recruited MacAlpine, and they wrote music with Aldridge and later recruited Rock for the singer slot. This album came after Macalpine’s solo debut album on Shrapnel, an all-instrumental guitar number closer to the Vai/Satriani school of thought, so this was a big shift for his talents.

Project: Driver, at least in structure, is nothing more than Whitesnake-ripoff cock-rock. It’s not the kind of hair metal that slutty girls swoon over, and it’s not technically interesting enough to get away with it, like Dokken or something. MacAlpine’s guitar work is decent, but the straight-up, three-minutes-forty, verse-chorus-solo-verse songs don’t let him show anything off. Plus the production tries to go for a Poison/Motley Crue sound on a garage band budget. It’s not tinny as much as it is compressed. Add on top of it that this Rob Rock guy sings like an overweight Long Island dude in leather pants belting out some Bad Company karaoke after a few too many beers.

There are a couple of “theme” songs, like “Nostradamus,” which are so Spinal Tap in quality, you’d expect the band to pop out of pods on stage to those numbers. Oddly enough, the more sex-oriented tunes like “Fantasy” and “Slave To Your Touch” are actually a bit better, because Rock’s vocals seem more convincing, and the songs bound forward a bit better when they’re more conventional and not trying to re-live Stonehenge. (Oh, in the fadeout to the latter, however, Rock squeals “you can’t ex-cape!” Doh!) The album ends with two songs, “I Can See It In Your Eyes” and “You and I,” that I would never, EVER want to listen to in a car for fear of stopping at a light with my window down and someone pulling up next to me.

Here’s the kicker, though. As bad as this album is, I really LIKE it. I don’t know if it’s a shared memory experience thing, or if it’s that some of the songs are really catchy. I also really enjoyed MacAlpine’s solo stuff, and this dovetailed nicely because of his distinctive guitar sound. For whatever reason, I always found this tape sneaking back into the player, of course when nobody was around. And I was very excited when I finally hunted down a CD version of the 35-minute classic. (My tape, with white case, actually had black oil stains on it from listening to it when working on my old car.) Anyway, I don’t expect one god damned person on this earth to understand why I like this or to like it themselves, but it’s one of many guilty pleasures, and I still like listening to it.

Rating: 7

It was all the rage at the time. It was what made Winger into a hit-producing machine. It was simple: take a couple of total shredmaster ultra wizards on guitar and bass, slap an obscure drummer behind them, and put a proficient yet largely unknown guy up front on mic and leather pants duty. But instead of launching through a Yngwie-like solo-fest that shows us all that you can hit every note on the fretboard four times a measure, take a big step back and write some laid-back numbers with a little feeling, and some good catchy melody. Put in a couple of good solos, have at least two or three ballads for the couples, but make it cool enough so that the Steve Vai types who are into total minor mode domination on the six-(or seven) string will still pick up a copy. Not only did this work well for Winger, but it was pretty much the formula of the Hagar-era Van Halen, too.

Mr. Big followed this formula after ex-Talas bassist Billy Sheehan finished his duties with David Lee Roth. (If you need more Van Halen connections here, it should be mentioned that Talas used to open for VH back in the day, and there was talk that Sheehan would replace Michael Anthony in the early 80s, which would have been pretty weird.) Sheehan is often called the Eddie Van Halen of the bass, as he does a lot of crazy ten-fingered tapping stuff on the four-string, including techniques like playing a chord progression on three strings while also tapping out a leading line on the other. It’s all total guitar geek shredder stuff, except on a lower register. Sheehan hooked up with Paul Gilbert, who is a bit of a guitar god himself. He started touring with bands when he was only 15, then went to GIT in California and after graduating, he immediately got an instruction spot. (He taught the guitar weirdo Buckethead, among others.) His band Racer X put out a couple of albums on Shrapnel records with a very high “whoa” factor, and he appeared in about every third page of Guitar Player magazine for most of the mid-eighties. Their four-piece was rounded out by semi-unknowns Eric Martin on vocals and Pat Torpey on drums.

The eleven-track self-titled debut from the band shows a good mix of proficiency and playability that demonstrates that you don’t need to blast through with super-fast drum beats and constant soloing to make songs work. That said, there are some faster numbers here. (I mean faster as in “not prom songs,” not faster as in Slayer.) The opening song “Addicted to That Rush” starts with Sheehan’s bass burbling at high speed like a nest of bumblebees before Gilbert jumps in and they duel lines a bit until the drums crash in and the song starts. The two work well in their ability to play together; there are parts where they are so synchronized, it sounds like one huge chord reaching from low registers to high, instead of two people playing their own lines. The album does sound slightly thin, but the bass has a very sharp and unique tone, not as high as a guitar, but almost like the sound of Stanley Clarke’s weird experimental solo basses that are tuned an octave higher.

There’s not much to be said about the vocals or lyrics on the songs. The lyrics, while bad, aren’t as bad as the way Martin has a tendency to whine or go nasal on certain things to make the lines seem really stupid. There’s a part where the lyrics are “A lover’s crime and punishment / Is do this, do that and put your eyes / Back in your head / Let’s play house instead.” Okay, that’s pretty stupid, just reading it. But the way he bunches words and emphasizes it makes you wish the verse was over and they’d go to the next solo.

Overall, each of the songs has its own groove, and they alternate between taking things easy (“Big Love”) and slightly rockier bits (“Rock & Roll,” “Merciless”). There’s one zippier song that’s my favorite on that end, “How Can You Do What You Do,” which almost seems like it was written as the “video” song, and I could see Eric Martin on a stage with no audience, wearing his leather pants and a bandana or two, singing into a large industrial fan. (They probably wouldn’t have the fan blowing trash around, like Skid Row or Motley Crue, though.)

Did I mention ballads? There are two. The second one is total cheese, called “Anything for You.” I discovered by accident that if you played this at double speed, it makes a snappy little jazz fusion number. But at regular tempo, hearing Martin dredge out “aaaaanything for youuuuu” is a bit painful. However, the other ballad, a Sheehan-penned piece called “Had Enough,” is quite good. It starts with just bass, and then adds in some very casual guitar before building up on the drums and going into the song full-steam. It’s a breakup song, and I’d be a liar if I said this thing wasn’t in my walkman constantly after my first couple of big post-dumping depresso-fests. It’s a very touching little song, because it stays laid-back and really features how Sheehan’s bass can carry a song without blowing up into full-on bassmaster lines.

Oh, and since this was the era for it, there is a “bonus track.” It’s included on both the tape and the CD, so I guess that doesn’t make it much of a bonus, but it’s a “live” track called “30 Days in the Hole.” I say “live” because this band formed in about ten seconds and rushed into the studio, so I don’t remember them playing any arenas before they recorded their album. I don’t know the origin of the song, but it sounds like maybe it’s an old cover. [It’s a Humble Pie cover, dumbass.] I always remember it though because when I arrived at college in the fall of 89 and I sat down at a computer for the first time, it required me to create a password with at least 12 characters and two of them non-letters, and “30daysinthehole” was the first thing that came to me. So for at least a semester or two, I always thought of Mr. Big when I checked my email, long after I got bored of this album.

This album’s not bad, and it still holds up to me. It was not their most popular work - I guess right after this, they did another album that got some airplay and had a couple of prom ballads. I never checked out any of their other stuff before they dropped off the earth (actually, they are, predictably, HUGE in Japan, and recorded a bunch of Japan-only albums) but I always had a sweet spot for this album, so I still find myself going back and giving it a listen.

Rating: 8