Slash’s video for “By the Sword” looks pretty cool. I’m not sure who the director was, but he or she did a pretty good job of capturing the western-y feel of the song; I mean, George Miller’s Mad Max franchise seems to have been a bigger touchstone for the visuals than, say, a Sergio Leone movie, but that’s fine. The Mad Max movies were basically westerns, anyway. I’ve thus far interpreted Andrew Stockdale’s lyrics as being a metaphor for the life of a touring musician, and the “story” in this video clearly has nothing to do with that; in fact, the story doesn’t really seem to have anything to do with the song’s content at all – I certainly have no idea why Slash would make a video where he kills his entire audience at the end, unless he was actually trying to impart the thought “Slash slays live” in the most literal sense – but whatever. That’s not really what bothers me about the clip.

So the Australian branch of iTunes has apparently uploaded thirty-second clips of all the songs from Slash’s forthcoming, self-titled solo album, and, of course, someone has uploaded all of those clips to YouTube. Gotta love the internet! So I thought we’d play one of our favorite games here at MetalSucks. It’s called “Let’s make premature judgments based on not very much actual music at all.” Listen to the clips in the video below, and then get my thoughts after the jump.

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Between his suicide-inducingly awful rape of “Paradise City,” his unveiling of the best cover art of 1988, and his general campaign to embarrass himself in public, I’d pretty much assumed that Slash’s new, self-titled solo album was going to be about as enjoyable as life as one of Axl Rose’s shirts. But on Friday Slash released not one, but two songs – one the first single for said solo album, the other a benefit track for Haiti – both of which, to my complete and total amazement, are really quite good.

We’ve actually heard a kinda lackluster live version of the album single, “By the Sword,” which features vocals by Wolfmother’s Andrew Stockdale. I tend to come from the Mike Patton school of thinking with regards to Wolfmother, but for whatever reason, Stockdale’s Robert Plant impersonation doesn’t bother me one bit here – in fact, I really like his performance, even if the lyrics are pretty dumb (Sample: “With the horses that you ride/And the feelings left inside/Comes a time you need leave all that behind.” Leave what behind? The horses? The feelings? The horses and the feelings? ‘Cause I think a man could reasonably part with one or the other, but BOTH? P’shaw!). But the riff is so catchy that it’s been stuck in my head for most of the weekend, and the guitar solo is epic, bluesy, classic Slash, the kind of thing that reminds me why I had this dude’s poster on my wall when I was an adolescent:

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So Slash performed a new song, “By the Sword,” at some benefit over the weekend, and of course there’s bootleg footage now on the net. It sounds better than the crap we’ve heard before, but the sound of Slash taking an actual crap would sound better than the crap we’ve heard before, so whatever.

The vocals are being performed here by Carrot Top. I don’t remember anyone saying that Carrot Top was on the actual album, so either he is and we just didn’t know it ’til now, or someone else sings the studio version. Let’s hope it’s the former.

Filling out the band for this performance is Dave Navarro, another dude from Jane’s Addiction who isn’t Navarro or Perry Farrell, and Blink-182′s Travis Barker, who tragically survived a plane crash earlier this year.

Slash’s solo album should ruin your 2010 sometime in the spring.

-AR