Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Few of us truly attain the place in which we can say we are Living The Dream, through bad decisions, the lack of aptitude, or even just plain bad fortune, the dream becomes a series of lucid, waking realisations that some steps were missed in the pursuit of the vision we once had, that the fantasy of our existence has become the revelation of a simpler, perhaps more tranquil, appearance, for after all, Living The Dream is quite often accompanied by stalking nightmare of excess and over-indulgence.
If you are going to live the fantasy then there are few examples in which the idol doesn’t fall, however like all idols, all those who have worked and played hard for their own sound to continue on when others around them have fallen by the wayside, then in the work of Slash, and featuring Myles Kennedy and the Conspirators, arguably you should look to.
A survivor of the Guns N’ Roses appetite for tension and excess, Slash has forged ahead with his own musical direction, firstly with the admired Velvet Revolver and now with Myles Kennedy, Slash epitomises that class is always permanent, that in the face of destruction that falls around us, we should always be ready to grasp the challenge and create art, to make a noise and register the fact that we have a duty to leave a memory of our time here on Earth.
The album is non-stop, a fidgeting pulse that does not keep still, one that defies perhaps the order to be regulated, to be confined; it is an order in the wind that must be disobeyed after all, nobody should ever pay attention to the demands of the limited in imagination or in vision.
Working once again with Myles Kennedy and the band offers the listener the realisation that living the dream is not always about the flamboyant and overload of the senses, it can mean that you have found a way to exist without the drama, that in any war a soldier can foresee a time of peace and being exactly who they wanted to be, without the casualty of believe being surrendered.
In tracks such as My Antidote, Mind Your Manners, Read Between The Lines, The One You Loved Is Gone and The Great Pretender, Slash, Miles Kennedy and the band seek the place where dreams can be beautiful and abiding, in the soul, in the heart, and they succeed with a sense of absolute fascination.
An album perhaps in which the listener knows what they are going to receive, but still makes them live for the hope that Slash will continue to dream and dream big.
Ian D. Hall