From today's Tribune:
Supergroup Chickenfoot an uninspiring cocktail
By Joshua Klein | Special to the Tribune May 25, 2009
We expect pomp and grandiosity from our supergroups. But when erstwhile Van Halen members Sammy Hagar and Michael Anthony, Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith and stunt guitarist Joe Satriani joined forces, they settled on a less than inspiring moniker: Chickenfoot. Yes, Chickenfoot. For all the name conveys, the group might as well have called itself Gone Fishin'.
Indeed, there's a certain busman's holiday quality to Chickenfoot, as if its principals came together not in service of any great musical vision but because they seemed to have had nothing better to do with their time between albums. At a sold out Park West on Friday night, the quartet did its best to rise to the occasion, even if the bar was set pretty low, and for about 90 minutes the guys played their hearts out and had a blast doing it, boldly sticking almost entirely to songs from its coming album (due June 9).
Yet as nothing more or less than the exact sum of its parts, Chickenfoot was a little like mixing all the soft drinks together at a local fast-food stop into a dubious cocktail: It didn't taste terrible, but it didn't taste particularly good either. Songs such as "Soap on a Rope," "Sexy Little Thing," "Oh Yeah" and "Get It Up" mostly featured sub-Zeppelin riffs several years past their expiration date, Hagar's and Anthony's hammy vocals and blistering, yet out of place, sci-fi solos from Satriani, all in service of tunes too silly, turgid or stupid to take seriously.
There's a place for stupidity in rock, of course. But stupidity plus banality is a deadly combination. The already famous and successful members of Chickenfoot may hope history repeats itself, but if the pointless band skirts tragedy, it instead heads straight to farce.
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