So last week marked the highly anticipated release of the debut album from Velvet Revolver, the latest “supergroup” player in the recent game of lead singer Musical Chairs. For the uninitiated, this Frankenstein-esque project takes the head of Stone Temple Pilots (a.k.a. Scott “Yes Your Honor, 90 Days Probation Sounds Fair” Weiland) and grafts it onto the headless body of Guns N’ Roses, whose various tattooed limbs include Matt Sorum, Duff McKagan and seminal guitarist Slash.

Now, being primarily a musical child of the late 80s and early 90s, this plants me firmly in the center of what record execs no doubt have enthusiastically labeled Velvet Revolver’s “core demographic”. (I can almost hear the sound of some record label bigwigs rubbing their hands together greedily when they were presented with the concept for this band.) I always enjoyed STP’s finely crafted though derivative rock and own most of their albums, and while I was never a huge GnR fanatic, you would not be too far out of line to say that I thought they were pretty solid, for a hair band-era group. They transcended the ebullient excess of their peers and crafted quality rock n’ roll. That’s why they were so huge, and why, if there were to be a full-fledged Guns n’ Roses reunion tour today, the enormous success of the thing would be abundantly clear with each passing city destroyed by rioting fans streaming out of the latest stadium where Axl never showed up.

Basically then, I felt inclined to give Velvet Revolver’s Contraband a go, and have been spinning it a few times this week to decide if it’s my cup of tea.

I will say right off the bat that Scott Weiland has no business whatsoever fronting this band. His lazy, floating tenor and raspy exclamations fit STP’s melodic, multi-chorded sound like a glove. But the GnR guys have a simpler but heavier “big” rock sound that demands a big rock voice, and if Velvet Revolver sounds a lot more like GnR than STP, it should surprise no one…after all, Guns outnumber Pilots here four to one, and indeed the band’s very name is practically a synonym for GnR.

Simply put, Scott Weiland does not possess that big rock voice. The highly straightforward (more on this in a moment) quasi-metal songs on this album are begging for the high-pitched wailing of an arena rock singer, one who vocally will dance with guitarist Dave Kushner’s fast-paced grunt and return the cry of Slash’s burbling licks. But there are two tasty flavors at odds with one another here…I love chocolate and I love roast beef, but I don’t love them together. Like them or not, at least you can say of Audioslave that they crafted a brand new sound out of their different elements: Chris Cornell brings something a little different to the table than what he did before, and so do Tom Morello and the other guys, and the result is something not like Soundgarden and not like Rage Against The Machine but strong and cohesive as a unit. Too often with Velvet Revolver, on the other hand, it sounds like Weiland is just singing an STP song in the same room where the others are performing a Guns n’ Roses song.

That may be, but what about the music itself? Slash and The Boys are back, right? Well, not exactly. I think what underwhelms me most about this album, and made it such a disappointment to me, is in fact the music. It’s just not all that interesting. Remember the first generation of CD players that had the button which would play the first 10 seconds of every song? That function seemed so useless at the time, but you could actually use it with most of the songs on this CD and you’d have gained a pretty complete summary of them all. There’s not much in the way of interesting bridges or solos to be heard, and that’s what especially surprised me: the “sound” of Guns n’ Roses had more to do with Slash’s guitar licks than anything else, but on this album they seem muted and subdued. That may have more to do with production than with the band itself, but it’s a major complaint all the same. What’s left is a very vanilla-sounding rock band, and it’s interesting to note that the music is hurting almost as much from the lack of Axl’s piano playing as from the lack of his voice.

All of this sounds very negative, and if anything it’s born of justifiably high expectations that this album just fails to meet for me. But I don’t mean to sell short the few really good tracks…”Slither” is undoubtedly the best of the bunch, and is in fact the only one that starts convincing you that maybe, just maybe this band needs to exist. “Set Me Free”, already exhausted on radio last year via its emergence on the Hulk soundtrack, is decent. There are also a pair of slower tracks on the album where Weiland’s talents start to shine, although again the void left by Axl’s piano is conspicuous.

All in all, this CD is worth a couple of listens just to say you did, and it’s worth buying for the novelty of owning the only album this band will put out before Scott punches one of his bandmates and has to go back into detox for a year and cancel their tour. If you’re looking for the latest chapter in the book of Dream Band Matchups, however, the best advice I can give you is to forget about the former accomplishments of its members, in order to avoid thinking of how badly they failed to live up to them on this album.