Review: GUNS N' ROSES Deliver The Goods Despite Postponement Of Infamous Album

Ben Ratliff of The New York Times reviewed GUNS N' ROSES' performance at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York City Friday night (May 12). An excerpt from the article follows:

Rock and roll audiences want to identify with the guy singing the song; they need to, in fact. But you'd be hard-pressed to prove that the crowd at the Hammerstein Ballroom on Friday night was identifying with W. Axl Rose. What does he represent, at this stage of the game? Survival? Re-invention? Creative control? The tortured artist? The persistence of the yowl? If the spirit of his age resides in him, his long postponement of an infamous album has diluted that spirit somewhat.

But if the physical reality of Mr. Rose — dressed L.A. style in a leather shirt and jeans and wearing a large silver cross, his hair corn-rowed and pulled back — wasn't an easy figure to identify with, his voice and body language did the job instead. When he sang "Paradise City", the crowd adopted a yowl in kind; when he danced in his undulating movements, like the letter S turning itself inside out, the men and women in the audience involuntarily moved that way too.

Friday night's concert was the first of four GUNS N' ROSES shows at Hammerstein Ballroom. On stage, Mr. Rose called them "warm-up shows" for the band's European tour, which begins May 25 in Madrid. It's fair to assume that the large-theater shows will have clearer sound and more effective stagecraft; Mr. Rose's voice sounded strong, even in his highest nasal shrieks, but the band wasn't using the warm-up time to experiment. The set list of the two-hours-plus show, complete with flash pots and confetti, came pretty close to what an only slightly different version of the band was playing four years ago, on its last tour.

Read the entire review at The New York Times.