"It's hardly uncommon for rock legends to make new music that has to compete against the memory of their past; it's rarer for them to be in direct competition with their own history. Slash's fourth solo album emerges in the midst of his continuing reunion with Axl Rose and Duff McKagan under the Guns N' Roses banner, and follows the deluxe reissue of Appetite for Destruction earlier this year. In fact, Living the Dream was recorded in breaks between last year's Guns tour ending and this one beginning. Against the past - against the most feral group in modern rock history, against his youthful self - Slash comes up short, unsurprisingly".