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SCOTT WEILAND - Stone Temple Pilots SLASH - Guns N' Roses, Slash's Snakepit DUFF - Guns N' Roses MATT SORUM - Guns N' Roses, Slash's Snakepit, The Cult DAVE KUSHNER - Infectious Grooves

Album Description
Japanese pressing includes one bonus track. BMG. 2008.

This CD is protected against unauthorized duplication. It is designed to play on standard playback devices and an appropriately configured computer. If you have questions or concerns visit www.sunncomm.com/support/bmg

Whatever. So I pop the CD in the computer so that I can rip it and put it on my iPod. The CD starts playing some auto play stuff and then an embedded Windows Media Player comes up in a web page and allows you to play the songs. Exit. I went into iTunes and hit Import to rip the tracks. When it finished I went to play the tracks and they were all garbled. What's going on? Guess I ought to read that web page.

So on that Sunncomm site it basically says the CD is protected. It will only allow you to play it on a computer with its technology. You cannot rip tracks from the CD. It specifically states that you cannot move the songs to an iPod because they (in so many words) don't like Apple and Apple isn't working with them so screw Apple. Huh? No, screw you. I like Apple and I just bought your music. But by the way, this album is available at the iTunes Music Store.

After doing some research, it turns out that this company is putting their copy protection on more and more CDs. This one happens to be the first one that I have bought. So now what? How does this work? Turns out that when Windows starts to auto-run the CD, it quickly installs a hidden driver on your machine that is used to garble the sound of CDs protected by this technology. So now my computer is "infected" with this driver. Some grad school student figured this out a while back and let the world know if you just hold down the shift key, Window's auto-run does not run and you have ready access to the CD. They threatened to sue him.

That solution is too late for me, I already have this installed. More research and system scans pointed me to a hidden driver on my machine called SbcpHid. You will find it in your Windows\System32\Drivers directory. So all you have to do is go into the Windows device manager, find it, stop it. Now you can rip. If you want it off your machine, you can uninstall it from there too.

While there was a sticker on the front of the CD, I found this to be very sneaky. I mean installing hidden drivers on your computer. The driver is not marked with any company name or details so you don't know what it is. The timestamp of the driver was manually adjusted so you couldn't tell that this was installed today. This sounds like most of the spyware that we are all trying to rid our computers of.

So where does that leave us? If you buy the music in a store, you can only play on these certain devices? If I would have bought this music at the iTunes music store, I am limited to what Apple wants me to do. So in this case, if I wanted a good old CD case and disc plus the music on my iPod, I would have to buy the same music 2 times according to the record company. That isn't right. Fair use law dictates it. If the industry doesn't get this figured out, we are going to be in trouble. For now, I guess you and I need to be selective about how we buy our music.


Signs of greatness lost in very poor production and mix.   June 8, 2004
 145 out of 210 found this review helpful

Slash is probably my favourite guitar player out there, so I was pre-conditioned to like this record.

However, what ended up blasting out of my speakers was saddening. I couldn't find any of the seething, snarling, bluesy energy of Guns N' Roses' material. I looked desperately for the soaring guitar melodies of "Estranged", "November Rain", "Sweet Child O' Mine" and "Civil War" but couldn't find that either; all the melodies are drowned in too many layers of cacophonous rhythm guitars playing weird Sabbath-y riffs that could've come from any of two dozen modern punk-metal bands. Producer Josh Abraham pretty much rendered everything in the bass frequences, without the crunch that had been the trademark of the Guns N' Roses guitar sound. I had been surprised about the muddy sound until I checked out Abraham's CV -- nu metal...nu metal...nu metal. Why am I not surprised?

I'd read in another review that former Stone Temple Pilots singer Scott Weiland's stylistic imprint is stronger than GNR, so I was waiting to hear some of his melodic sensibilities, which can be dazzling when they're at their peak. Alas, the producer opted to drown him out too, seemingly forgetting to whip down the faders on the rhythm guitars or scoop out enough midrange to let the vocals breathe. The whole album is a mess of sounds struggling to get center stage, with none of them succeeding. Listening to this record for 10 minutes gave me a serious case of ear fatigue thanks to too many thick arrangements. Stone Temple Pilots had a gift for making thick arrangements sound disciplined and clear, and that gift is nowhere in earshot here.

There are some good grabber parts here. The rumbling bass intro to "Slither" conjures good rock mystique, the melodic clean guitars of "Fall to Pieces" (though, again, Weiland's vocals should have been mixed way up), the fiddley high melodies of closing track "Loving the Alien". But all the good parts, again, struggle to be heard because Abraham didn't have the good sense to scoop some space out to allow space for them. Abraham should be tied to a chair for a month to listen to Metallica's "black album" 24/7, to learn how producer Bob Rock let different instruments take centerstage from song to song and part to part.

Contraband sounds like what the title implies -- a band whose parts are fighting against one another, a slush of heavy yet undefined sounds. Weiland and Slash have both shown genius-level sensibilities for hooks and melodies before (eg. Weiland's melodies for STP's "Interstate Love Song" and "Still Remains"; Slash's immortal "Sweet Child O' Mine" intro and that classic "November Rain" solo); it's obvious on this record that their parts are drowned out and need to be focused. Where is Mike Clink (producer for Appetite for Destruction, Megadeth's Rust in Peace) when you need him?


Will not play on my computer   June 18, 2004
 31 out of 37 found this review helpful

This CD won't play on my PC. So I don't even know if the music is good or not.


Pretty good album, but not worth giving up your rights.   June 18, 2004
 30 out of 35 found this review helpful

I am a huge fan of Stone Temple Pilots (I own all of their records and have been to several shows). I was really looking forward to this CD until I found out that it has copy restrictions. Purchasing a CD with copy restrictions (even easily defeatable restrictions) tells record labels that consumers will accept this erosion of their rights, and allows them to more easily introduce further restrictions in the future. If I can't backup the music that I purchased and convert it to whatever format that I wish, I'm not interested. It really makes me sick that Velvet Revolver would support this. Vote with your dollar.


Might be good songs on here, but I can't tell.   June 10, 2004
 27 out of 33 found this review helpful

I was not very pleased with this CD. The songs might be good but I can't really tell becasue of the mastering. So many CDs are mastered incorrectly today. In an effort to make the CD seem "louder", they amplify the signal until there is significant clipping (i.e. distortion). I have seen this on everything from Rush-Vapor Trails, to some of the Jimi Hendrix remasters. One song on this CD has over 17000 clipped samples in each channel. But honestly the distortion is not very noticable. The problem is that it limits the dynamic range of the recording and it ends up just sounding like loud noise.

Another problem with this CD is the copy protection. It plays fine on a CD player, but on a computer you must install their software to play it. Also, it becomes difficult to get these tracks on to your MP3 player. Of course this copy protection scheme depends on you having Autorun enabled on your machine. Autorun makes your computer automatically run programs that are on a CD that you insert. So if Autorun is enabled (the default on XP/NT) it will automatically load something on your PC which keeps you from being able to rip the audio files on this particular CD. The problem is that I don't like something being installed without asking. Even if you select that you do not want to install their software by not accepting their terms (this will make the CD eject from your computer), the driver is left on your PC and you will have to manually uninstall it. If you have Autorun disabled (it is a simple edit in the registry, you can search on how to do it) the copy protection won't work and you will never even know that the CD is copy protected (as long as you don't run the "launch.exe" file that is on the CD). The audio tracks can be ripped as usual. Also, Autorun can be temporarly suspended if you just hold down the "Shift" key while inserting the CD. Most people know this already, so I don't see this copy protection doing anything but annoying honest people that just want to listen to the CD on their PC or download the songs to their MP3 player (or make a copy of the CD). If the launch.exe file is every run on your PC (either by having Autorun enabled, forgetting to hold the Shift key when inserting the CD, or by manualy running launch.exe) then the driver is loaded on your PC and you will not be able to copy files to your hard drive or to your mp3 player (without using their methods).