Is it as bad ass as that Sudden Death song that they made last year was? For that matter I heard that the album has a re-make of that track on it - is it bad ass too!

I find this whole thing kind of interesting from a creative perspective.

I mean St Anger to me was like a Jam session that showed promice for what could have been ok songs - if trimmed down, recorded better, and kind of workshoped for a while. Figured it was just to the bad dynamics at the time.

Then Death Magnetic is a pretty solid album to me - and seemed to be showing signs of the greatness of metallica's youth...so to go on to this....I admit i've only heard one track...but it's really bizzare to me...these guys used to be so invovational with what they did on guitar...and I'll grant they're trying something out of the box by switching styles...but it's so bland.

Fudementally although I know there were overdubs and stuff - the old songs were all designed to play live with 2 guitars - so  I've always felt the 3 guitar model added a lot of  excess to the sound.

On previous tours it didn't work. Like Bucket seemed to do nothing for large amounts of the time, while robbin seemed to struggle with faster passages of slash's work. Just made no sense.

I used to be very anti it - but I will say the Ron/DJ/Richard model seems to have found a good balance and way to divide the songs.

All that said...if you are going to have less guitarists...one of them needs to be bad ass that can do the shred stuff ala chinese democracy - so one of them needs to be Ron or a Buckethead or a similar player.

I think 2006 GNR minus Ron would have been significantly lacking something, so I'd say Axl made the right call on this one. But I'll grant you it does seem to have been last minute!