AFI’s Very Proud Of Ya is pure hardcore punk—90 second songs of furiously fast chording and picked bass lines, frenetic time-keeping on the drums, and defiant lyrics spit out in the simplest of melodies by a nearly incomprehensible voice. There are no pretensions of serious music here, but it makes a good 40 minutes of pumping your fist in the pit.

AC/DC are unique within the pantheon of hard rock gods. Malcolm Young’s lean but meaty riffs and Bon Scott’s sneering voice and lyrics filled with delightfully euphemistic lyrics are instantly recognizable. Few guitarists have sounded so powerful while grooving so hard, and few vocalists have so passionately celebrated sleaze. Highway To Hell is not only the last album recorded by the original line-up, it is also the best.

The title track, with its simple but memorable main riff, sing-along chorus, and dangerous ode to life on the road, was destined to be a classic. The faster “Girls Got Rhythm” is excellent, as is “Shot Down In Flames”. “Walk All Over You”, “Touch Too Much”, “Beating Around The Bush”, “Get It Hot”, “If You Want Blood (You Got It)”, and “Love Hungry Man” are all great songs, although they do not quite rise to the level of the aforementioned material. The plodding closer, “Night Prowler”, is an excellent change of pace.

This is probably one of the 10 greatest hard rock albums ever recorded.

Blind Faith is a good album, but the weakest of Clapton’s so-called “supergroup” years before he started working as a solo act. The step back from the in-your-face guitar heroics of Cream to largely laid-back accompaniment works well for him. Winwood’s soulful vocals are excellent, and his organ playing enhances most of the songs.

Each of the Winwood compositions - “Had To Cry Today”, “Can’t Find My Way Home”, and “Sea Of Joy” - are very pleasant, plaintive pseudo-ballads. The main section of Clapton’s “Presence Of The Lord” is similar and also of similar quality, but the psychedelic middle, which is also interesting on its own, does not really seem to fit. Ginger Baker’s “Do What You Like” is built on a great jazzy, 1-bar ostinato in 5/4, but drags on for far too long.

The only significant disappointment in the album is that there is so little material. There are albums that can seem complete with only five originals and a cover, but this is not one of them.

On Working Man Albert Cummings continues to expand on the songwriting, guitar chops, and soulful singing that made True To Yourself a smashing success. This album includes country influences, experiments with a shuffle beat, and uses a new, funkier rhythm section. While Cummings makes each of these sub-genres his own, it is not as good as the blues-rock in which he truly excels.

The first track is a cover of Merle Haggard’s “Workin’ Man Blues”, which captures precisely the sentiments of all of Cummings’s most sincere work. The uptempo blues boogie arrangement works quite well for a country song 35 years old. “Say You Love Me” returns to Cummings’s earlier style, and he sits right in the midtempo grooves of “I Feel Good” and “Girls To Shame”.

“Let Me Be” is an ok ballad, but he has done better. “Feeling End” is a fairly simple song by his standards, but a beautiful one. The band does a good fast shuffle on “Party Right Here”, but there is nothing original about it. “I’m Free” is similarly nothing special, and “First Day” is another ballad that is only interesting because of his excellent vocals. The album doesn’t pick up again until “Please”, which is another boogie, then ends with a tender country ballad in “Last Dance”.

After the good, if unoriginal, cover of “Live And Let Die” and the excellent reworking of “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” from Use Your Illusion I & II, an entire album of other people’s songs from Guns N’ Roses sounds like a great idea. Unfortunately, “The Spaghetti Incident?” falls hard. Most of the songs aren’t bad - although Axl’s singing on “Down On The Farm” is unlistenable - but they are generally no better than the originals.

Perhaps the Gunners are only good cover artists when they reach for songs outside of the punk / glam rock / metal traditions that so heavily inform their own songwriting. The doo-wop song “Since I Don’t Have You” doesn’t work as well as their covers of McCartney or Dylan, but it does much better than the rest of the album. Perhaps the departures of Stradlin and Adler were more devastating to the band’s creativity than realized. Whatever the cause, the last LP by Guns N’ Roses before it became solely a vehicle for Rose’s ego is quite forgettable.

True To Yourself seems at times almost a copy of From The Heart, because Cummings’s style is so recognizable. However, nearly every track on this record is better than its counterpart on his previous effort.

The first track, “Man On Your Mind”, gets it started with the same kind of blues-rock rave-up that lead out on From The Heart. “Work It Out” is more understated, depending on choppy upbeats from the guitar to make an entrancing groove. “Come Up For Air” features a heavy, slide-based rhythm part and one of his more scorching solos, while “Blues Makes Me Feel So Good” is more of a traditional rollicking blues tune.

“Where Did I Go Wrong”, “Your Sweet Love”, and “Separately” are also excellent rocking tracks, while “Sleep” brings it down to a whispered lullaby. “Lonely Bed” is a mournful lament that works just as well as the pyrotechnics. The album closes with the rousing “Follow Your Soul”.

Cummings writes lyrics for the Everyman, discussing topics such as heartbreak, exhaustion, and family. His “Blues Makes Me Feel So Good” is right on the money—as he sings, “some people say that the blues makes you said; best damn feeling I must have ever had”. Bluesmen tend to sing about hard times and hard lives, but the blues isn’t about wallowing in pity; it is about communal catharsis through the power of music.

Cummings’s guitar work has improved across the board and is a real treat, but it is still his powerful voice that really carries the music. This is undoubtedly one of the most important releases of this decade for blues-rock and modern electric blues.

The second half of this pseudo double album is a bit more mellow, but cut from the same cloth as Use Your Illusion I.

The best track is not a Guns N’ Roses composition, but the cover of “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door”, which blows Dylan and Clapton’s versions away. The arrangement fits the song structure well, and Slash’s guitar absolutely sings in his two solo spots. The only thing detracting from it is the telephone dialing noises used in the breakdown. “Civil War” is similarly marred by the inclusion of samples and speech, but even without them the music is a bit cloying.

“You Could Be Mine” starts with a great instrumental introduction, then chugs into one of the best hard rock songs of the decade. “Get In The Ring”, “Locomotive”, and “Shotgun Blues” also recall the hard and fast ways of Appetite For Destruction, though they are not nearly of the same quality. “Shotgun Blues” comes out of the band like the blast of such a firearm, but the call-outs of various critics and journalists spoils “Get In The Ring”.

“Estranged” is not quite as good as “November Rain”, but it is very good. The long instrumental breaks particularly make it enjoyable. Several other songs also defly combine the band’s traditional sound with prominent piano parts: “14 Years”, “Yesterdays”, “Breakdown”, and “So Fine”.

There is a bit of a disappointment in “Pretty Tied Up”, which is just ok, and “Don’t Cry (altern)”, which offers no improvement over the original. The bizarre “My World” sounds as out of place as it is. (Apparently, the band was not aware of its existence until the album had been pressed.) The album as a whole, however, is quite good. Nothing could ever compare to Appetite For Destruction, but Use Your Illusion makes a much better impression than its sibling.

Recording with Double Trouble, the former backing band for the legendary Stevie Ray Vaughan, is a way to set expectations that can never be met. It was a daring choice for Albert Cummings to make on his debut album From The Heart, but he acquits himself well enough. While flashy lead lines were Vaughan’s bread-and-butter, Cummings makes an impression largely as a hard-hitting rhythm guitarist and and soulful vocalist.

The carefully-controlled crunch of the first 15 seconds of “Your Own Way” are everything a blues-rock song should be about, and the rest of the song holds up as well. The slower groove of “The Long Way” is more of a showcase for the stellar rhythm section, but is fairly predictable, as is the shuffle of “Regular Man” and “I’ve Got Feelings Too”. “Tell It Like It Is” is bland instrumentally but Cummings’s wordplay and vocal delivery are a powerful hook. The vocals also largely carry “Together As One” and “Barrel House Blues”. The closing ballad “Beautiful Bride” falls flat, but even here Cummings’s clear singing makes it work.

There is plenty of good material on this album, but also a fair amount of filler. For the most part Double Trouble sound quite average, which they certainly are not. Cummings sings well and his working man’s lyrics seem sincere, but he only occasionally shows off his chops. A few more rocking tracks would have made this a much better disc.

While Closing Time is ostensibly the sequel to Catch-22, it is a remarkably different book in tone and style. Catch-22 was brimming with satire and absurd persons and situations. This style of writing is still present in Closing Time, particularly in those chapters about Yossarian, Chaplain Tappmann, and Milo Minderbinder, but it is significantly less noticeable there and almost completely absent from the sections of the book about Sammy Singer, Lew Rabinowitz, and their compatriots. The remainder is a fairly straightforward look at the lives these men lead and the memories they have of their youth.

The Singer and Rabinowitz story is compelling on its own but only very peripherally related to Catch-22. The stories of the returning characters are interesting, but frequently too bizarre. The bits about governmental incompetence and Yossarian’s dealings with nurse Macintosh, Minderbinder, and Gaffney are all excellent, but I am still unsure what to make of Tappman’s subplot or the great mystery of what lies beneath the Port Authority Bus Terminal. The ending makes perfect sense as a closure for both the themes of Catch-22 and Closing Time, but it leaves too much unresolved and open to interpretation for my tastes.

The best parts of the novel are flashbacks to events from Catch-22, often from a different perspective than originally described, and the Singer and Rabinowitz families’ battles against cancer. There are many references to the Ring Cycle and other Wagnerian works. I suspect that I would appreciate the novel much more if I were highly familiar with the librettos from these works, as Yossarian’s story seems to be somewhat intended as a modern retelling of Siegfried’s journey. Heller also references a man named Vonnegut who survives the Dresden bombings with Rabinowitz, in a rare literary allusion that I recognize.

As might be expected by its lesser critical acclaim, Closing Time is not nearly as good of a work as Catch-22, which was truly a masterpiece. It is, however, a fairly interesting novel, and recommended for anyone who has enjoyed Heller’s other work.

With an album title of Use Your Illusion I, you might think that the angry, hard-partying Guns N’ Roses we knew was a carefully crafted image to sell records to disaffected youths, concealing a group of mild-mannered, health-conscious musicians. Sadly, this was not the case, and the toll of living out that image was already fracturing the band.

Although the Use Your Illusion discs were released more than four years after the band’s previous LP, many of the songs are leftovers from the Appetite For Destruction era or earlier. It is easy to see why these did not make the cut the first time; for the most part they do not live up to the high standards set in 1987. Appetite For Destruction contained three fantastic hard rock songs, while Use Your Illusion I has only one great song, and it is in a different genre entirely.

There are a few good riff-rock tunes that continue the band’s early tradition: “Right Next Door To Hell”, “Double Talkin’ Jive”, “Dust N’ Bones”, and “Perfect Crime” are as good as the weakest tracks from Appetite For Destruction. “Don’t Damn Me” would make this list as well, but the sentiment of the rocker who wants neither praise nor damnation but simply to make music sounds good coming from Ozzy (“I Don’t Know”), but sounds hollow coming from Rose’s massive ego. “Bad Apples” is similarly good musically, but the hodgepodge of mixed metaphors makes poor lyrics.

“Garden Of Eden”, “Bad Obsession”, “Back Off Bitch”, and “Dead Horse” have their moments as well. “Garden Of Eden” is the most breakneck thrashing the band has ever performed, but it lacks the spirit that should make it work. The harmonica part and some rare slide guitar from Slash save “Bad Obsession” from mediocrity, but his solo that echoes and expands on the vocal line in “Dead Horse” does not make up for the acoustic introduction.

Although a bit of a musical departure for the Gunners, Axl’s magnum opus “November Rain” utilizes their strengths very well. Rose’s voice is actually more suited to this grandiose balladry than the quick and dirty songs that make up most of the band’s catalog. Slash’s greatest gift is his ability to make that smooth Les Paul lyrical even as he shreds, and this is one of the finest examples of its use. The rhythm guitar that is otherwise critical in their work is relegated to the background, but the piano and symphonic orchestration provide a surprisingly effective song structure.

The cover of “Live And Let Die” hardly changes anything from the Wings original, but it comes out a more powerful, exciting song. “Coma” has potential with a great main theme, but it is not good enough to sustain the song through 10 long minutes, or to excuse the heartbeat sound effects and sampled speech.

“You Ain’t The First” is filler, and “The Garden” is, quite simply, terrible. “Don’t Cry” combines many of the same elements that made “November Rain” work, but the result is much less satisfying.

Coming from any other band, Use Your Illusion I would be a great release, but most of it pales in comparison to what we know Guns N’ Roses is capable of.