Slash’s second album with Myles Kennedy and the Conspirators (and third overall) turns ten this week so it seems like now is the right time to take a look back at it, much as I did when its predecessor, Apocalyptic Love, turned ten a couple of years ago. Where its predecessor proved that they could make music together and weren’t just a solid live unit, World on Fire cemented the fact and it wasn’t just a one-off.
Back when the album was announced, it was basically a dream come true: a mammoth seventeen tracks (seriously, how many rock albums have that man tracks now?), including an instrumental, a handful of songs which were over five minutes long and a couple which almost crossed the seven-minute mark for a staggering runtime of 77 minutes. And this time around, there were no bonus tracks on any of the various editions released. Everyone was going to hear all of it in all its glory. As someone who couldn’t (and still can’t) get enough music from Slash, it was glorious. It was everything I wanted. And I got mine early in one of the final, if not the final, Classic Rock fan pack – the magazine’s dedicated special edition issue to a band and their latest release.
It featured clean production, now with Michael “Elvis” Baskette – Alter Bridge’s long-time producer, riffs which saw Slash at his most incendiary and the band showing how tight a unit they’d become in the four years of constant touring. With Myles Kennedy so busy with Alter Bridge who had exploded in popularity in recent years, it meant rhythm guitar duties this time around fell to Slash himself (Frank Sidoris would take up the mantle for its follow-up, Living the Dream, when he would become a fully-fledged Conspirator rather than just a touring member). Kennedy’s hardly a slouch on the guitar and Slash himself has admitted to learning from Kennedy but the approach to this album allowed for a sound that was just a bit more raw and stripped back.
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Lyrically, it saw them back in familiar territory for the most part, much of their lyrics relating to living for today. Indeed, its title track is a high-octane retreading of its predecessor’s title track. Elsewhere, there were stories like personal favourite “30 Years to Life” (I still hold out hope I’ll get to see them play that one day), “Shadow Life”, “Dirty Girl” and the evergreen “Wicked Stone”, the latter of which has become a live staple and sees Slash work in a ten minute solo whilst Kennedy, Todd Kerns, Brent Fitz and Frank Sidoris keep it locked down with an infectious rhythmic loop.
But the album also saw them start to integrate more real subjects – “Beneath the Savage Sun” illustrates the plight of elephants being hunted for their tusks and is told through the lens of a young elephant losing its mother to poachers, “The Dissident” is very much a political, anti-war rap and closer “The Unholy” is still one of the darkest Conspirators songs as they take aim at child abuse within the Catholic Church. Melodically, it’s sinister as hell to match the subject, its tender intro giving way to anger before unbridled fury. Whilst the album is largely full of aggression, they work in a couple of ballads with “Battleground” full of sorrow as it reflects a once promising relationship which has turned toxic whilst “Bent to Fly” is introspective, the coming of age struggle and need to mature.
This album would see Slash and the boys tour with it for over a year. It landed them in arenas in the UK for their biggest ever tour. Personally, I got to see them three times – twice in Glasgow (that co-headliner with Biffy Clyro at the O2 Academy and still one of the hottest tickets Glasgow has ever seen, especially when they were the princely sum of £10) and a month later in the Hydro where they were plagued with abysmal acoustics and something which happened this year when they revisited it – just the standard for that hovel. And one final time six months later at Download where I screamed myself hoarse and it rained. Because it always rains during Slash’s performances at Download. It didn’t feel like it would be some time before we’d see the band again but it would be almost five years before their return to the UK, mainly because a few months later Slash revealed he and Axl Rose were back on speaking terms, Guns N’ Roses had lost its then-current guitarists and it sent the rumour mill into overdrive. Hogmanay (New Year’s Eve) saw their final performance for a couple of years, the emotions running high with Lemmy’s death a mere four days prior which gave way to an effervescent rendition of “Ace of Spades” – seriously, Google it.
As the culmination of everything which came before, World on Fire is an excellent album. But now, ten years on, it stands as the weakest of the Conspirators album. It’s not bad by any stretch and I played it to death. I loved the self-indulgence of it all. I loved how heavy it was. I loved how it was longer and better than Apocalyptic Love. I loved how beefy it was in its production. But now, I realise all of that was recency bias – newer was better. Ask me to pick my favourite Conspirators album now and I’ll flip a coin to choose either its predecessor or its successor. Now, it feels bloated and you could pull out a handful of tracks to make a much tighter, leaner record. I never really cared for “Shadow Life” even then and if you pulled out “Too Far Gone”, “Withered Delilah” and “Iris of the Storm”, I wouldn’t miss them. I don’t think about them now writing this other than to type their names. But I love the rest of the album whole-heartedly and some of those songs still have amazing bits of guitar work, excellent vocals, bass lines which will rattle your fillings and drums which have oodles of groove. The album also feels a touch over-produced and you can hear it reined in on Living the Dream when they returned to work with Baskette.
This was Slash completely off the lead, going all-in on his solo endeavours and whilst time might make it seem a little heavy-handed, the man in the top hat had nothing to lose or prove. At this point in time, it was his only band and whilst he and his band may have made better albums before or since, there was a lot to love on it and there still is – even on their most recent tour, there’s a handful of songs which feature in the live set. Because they work wonderfully and like every Conspirators album, every track was intended to be played live.
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World on Fire is still what you’d expect from the band. It was real, it paid homage to the art of the riff, it was unbridled hard rock. There was an incredible band, bristling with a chemistry that sadly isn’t common enough, powering it all with the promise that this was them only getting started. And it was. After that Hogmanay show, they’d all go their separate ways for a time, Myles Kennedy would reconvene with Alter Bridge and Todd Kerns and Brent Fitz would form Toque, likely whilst the former was juggling another ten bands and projects. And as for the main man? He’d rejoin Guns N’ Roses with Duff McKagan and conquer the world, putting the Conspirators on ice for a couple of years whilst he lived the dream.
Header image by Travis Shinn
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