Unhealthy appetite (continued)

DO ROCK FANS WANT "Patience" and "November Rain" on the same album as "Sweet Child o’ Mine" and "Paradise City"? Of course they do. But the Guns N’ Roses holy grail will always be Appetite for Destruction: just ask Axl, who performed a whopping 10 of that disc’s 12 songs when I saw him in concert two years ago. That same ratio applies to Bring You to Your Knees (Law of Inertia), a well-executed new GN’R tribute album featuring 14 heavy hitters from the American hardcore underground. As Law of Inertia label head Ross Siegel recently told AP, this is an idea whose time has come. "Heavy music doesn’t take itself as seriously as it did six years ago, when all hardcore bands were tough-guy, straight-edge killjoys. Now jeans, sunglasses, and whiskey are back; so is singing about girls and rocking out. I thought it would be interesting to take bands from the current environment and have them interpret the most hedonistic band of the last 20 years."

A week after Bring You to Your Knees came out, I went to a sold-out club show by Buffalo’s Every Time I Die, who are playing OzzFest this summer and contribute a straight-faced cover of the folk-rocker "Used To Love Her" to the disc. The band took most of their cues from contemporaries like Converge and Queens of the Stone Age, but frontman Keith Buckley wore a skintight Bon Jovi T-shirt and wasn’t shy about preening for the moshpit. The kids are already calling it glamcore — and if GN’R could cover first-gen East Coast punks the Dead Boys, then a bunch of umpteenth-gen East Coast punks with metal chops covering GN’R is only natural.

I say East Coast for a reason, because most of the West Coast bands look better than they sound on Bring You to Your Knees. Or maybe they just get outclassed by two prominent New Jersey groups, the Dillinger Escape Plan and God Forbid, who will never be mistaken for Skid Row wannabes. Dillinger add to their formidable legend by running "My Michelle" through their trusty electro/jazz/grind wringer, without ignoring the rock essentials of swinging, shredding, and enunciating: this is one of the hottest deconstructionist covers you’ll hear all year. On "Out ta Get Me," God Forbid frontman Byron Coley crosses Axl with the Bad Brains while the band channel Judas Priest.

Eighteen Visions are the only group who show up with a star producer, Mudrock (Godsmack), which might be part of the reason why their "Paradise City" is so tame. Fellow Californians Bleeding Through lean into "Rocket Queen" with exuberance but sabotage the emo histrionics at the end with irony — which, as any Dillinger fan knows, is a dead scene. Tuneful Inland Empire geeks the Beautiful Mistake close the album with the haunting "November Rain" clone "Estranged," a prime candidate for the second volume of GN’R’s Greatest Hits. Axl can keep a good band down all he wants, but we’ll always have their back catalog.