Let’s be perfectly clear about what I am reviewing here. This is not a Guns N’ Roses album, any more than It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere, Izzy Stradlin & The Ju Ju Hounds, or Contraband was. Axl may have legal rights to the name, but he should have credited this to “Rose N’ Hired Guns”.

In spite of my bitterness over the name and Axl’s antics and the ridicule Rose has faced over the decade in which this album was in production, I had some high hopes. A friend of mine who is also a long time fan praised the album extensively, so I checked it out. Unfortunately, it did not meet those expectations.

The complex arrangements, crushing guitars, gentle piano leads, and wailing remain from previous records, and this is good. Now, however, they are mixed with a techno drumbeat in nearly every track, awful synthesized sound effects, and hip-hop style sampling. Every track has some great parts, but very few are not marred by serious defects. In particular, at least half of the tracks have intros that make me wince.

The piano-driven ballads with obligatory slices of heavy rock thrown in (“Street Of Dreams” and “This I Love”) work best. The solo on “This I Love” even sounds like something Slash might have played. “Prostitute” is also very Use Your Illusion like if you can ignore the drumming. The other ballad, “Sorry”, uses some sort of terrible ambient music as accompaniment.

There are also some decent rockers, including the title track, “Catcher In The Rye”, “Better”, and “Scraped”. None of these, however, has anything compelling me to listen to them again. “Shackler’s Revenge” goes too far over the line into industrial to be redeemed by a decent guitar solo, and the main bodies of “There Was A Time”, “I. R. S.”, and “Riad N’ The Bedouins” are not interesting enough to make up for their introductions.

“If The World” and “Madagascar” actually have good introductions, featuring Spanish guitar on the former and horns in the latter, but then quickly fall into the same techno trap.

I get it. Rose wants to be thought of as an artist, not just a rocker. I just can’t find this enjoyable. If you tore apart the best ideas from these songs and reduced them to what they probably were before 15 years of tinkering, you would probably have some pretty good material. I think the endless tinkering buried the rock & roll behind layers of crap.