After-Listening Reviews of ' Chinese Democracy'

THE STATISTICS SPEAK for themselves. 14 years, 14 studios, a minimum of five producers, at least the same amount of guitarists, a revolving door of session players and mind-boggling sums of money. But ultimately, Chinese Democracy, the first new album of original songs to appear under the Guns N' Roses banner since 1991, is the story of one man. Axl Rose, the wayward kid from Indiana turned razorblade-voiced global rock icon and one of the last decade's most mysterious recluses, has finally put his tools down. The saga is over.

Phil Alexander, MOJO's Editor-In-Chief, will be bringing you the full MOJO analysis very soon, but since we've just heard the thing, we thought it only fair to give you our immediate impressions of the record most thought had been assigned to the archive of legendary might-have-beens – along with The Beach Boys’ Smile and that Johnny Marr/Ian McCulloch record they left in the back of a cab.

First impressions are of an overwhelming avalanche of activity (ideas, sounds, stuff) – as much as might conceivably be stuffed into a 14-track rock album – and a surprisingly up-to-date sound.

1. Chinese Democracy
A sprinkling of background voices and the sound of street-side rattle begin a song ignited by the sort of propellant, processed guitar incisions that saturate all of the album's full-tilt offerings. Here is the mechanised underbelly of Rose's 21st Century debut. "All I've got is precious time," he sings.

2. Shackler's Revenge
Axl harmonises with himself as a furious wall of pitch-shifting guitars bite into a Foo Fighters-esque rumble that is so jammed-packed full of overdubs, it's a wonder he manages to maintain any structure whatsoever. Released with the new instalment of the mega-selling Rock Band video game, could this also be a dig at his old sparring partner Slash? "Don't ever try to tell me, how much you care for me / Don't ever try to tell me, how you were there for me," he growls.

3. Better
"This melody inside of me still searches for solution". The verse is a pop-rock groove that evokes Pacific nights and sunset drives. The chorus on the other hand is a pulverising minor-key rant augmented by more trilling axe-work and a final guitar solo surely ear-marked for one-time Chinese Democracy contributor Brian May. (Queen's guitarist ruminates on Axl' s latest halfway down the page).

4. Street Of Dreams
Played live during Guns N'Roses most recent outings and led by Axl’s long-serving piano man Dizzy Reed, this gargantuan, Jim Steinman-flavoured ballad was originally called The Blues. November Rain fans should be queuing around the block.

5. If the World
A break-beat intro; a sparse melody punctuated by a clutch of power chord shimmies and a Spanish flavoured acoustic guitar flourish that immediately reminded your correspondent of Use Your Illusion I’s Double Talkin' Jive.

6. There Was A Time
Almost 7 minutes long, this is one of Chinese Democracy's defining moments. "It was a bargain for the summer,” rues Axl, “And I thought I had it all". Phalanxes of guitars engage in panoramic battle with a gloriously histrionic vocal – he’s lost none of his power, or he hadn’t at whatever point in the last 14 years he recorded this – before it signs off with a burst of an unnecessarily digitised choir.

7. Catcher N' The Rye
Axl's nod to J.D Salinger's outsider opus is split into sections that could quite happily soundtrack the credit sequence to a frat-boy rom-com. Fans of Guns’ most melodic offerings should find solace here. Unsurprising to see Queen producer Roy Thomas Baker’s name on the credits.

8. Scraped
An impenetrable, gothic head-mess of damaged distortion and chordal-riff guitars, this is one of the album's most brutal tracks.

9. Riad N' Bedouins
In my notes I wrote the word “defibrillator”. A wired and awakening sound (the army of guitars, the piercing high notes) that's followed by Axl Rose screaming defiant epithets such as: “I don't give a fuck about this ’cos I’m crazy!”

10. Sorry
Electro-pulsing, Pink Floyd-esque ballad that throws up this chorus-opening: “I'm sorry for you / Not sorry for me”, before opening out into a Gilmouresque guitar solo.

11. I.R.S.
Axl: “Gonna call the president / Gonna call a private eye / Gonna get the IRS / Gonna need the FBI”. The man's paranoia is made explicit through another wall of dense guitars and scattershot solos.

12. Madagascar
A processional anthem replete with excerpts from Martin Luther King's I Had A Dream speech, this is a track that's been battered around since the late '90s (see the band's MTV performance here . Once again we find Axl betrayed, imploring, "Forgive them that teared (sic) down my soul / Bless them that they might grow old / And free them so that they may know / That it's never too late". Did he pen these lyrics as he saw Guns fall apart in the mid-‘90s? It’s all a bit biblical.

13. This I Love
Axl Rose the record-head. Witness the melancholic, Elton John-style piano and the soaring verses. It’s a heraldic drama straight from the fantasyland of Queen II and quite possibly the most heartfelt song on the record. Everything he's been striving for since Use Your Illusion II's Estranged. Andrew Lloyd-Webber wouldn't balk at this.

14. Prostitute
Chinese Democracy ends as it begins in grand, posturing style. “I’ve got a message for you,” sings the man that for so long has refused to say a word. Those tinny, break-beat drums appear again, as do layer upon layer of furiously overdriven guitars. One final ambient wash of organ and then, just like that, he’s gone.

So there it is. A brash, unashamedly super-sized cacophony of songs that are overdubbed to hell, but occasionally hint at the monolithic power Axl has been chasing all these years. If his voice – that vitriolic screeeeeech – often sounds like it's making its way back from a time when the original line-up of the band ruled the world, perhaps that was inevitable.

By Ross Bennett - MOJO



When Guns n'Roses last released their own material, it was an event of not inconsiderable cultural significance. I remember the excitement at school as everyone rushed out to spend what was to us a small fortune on the two CDs, one red and orange, one black and blue. Stores opened specially for the release of Use Your Illusion I and II in 1991 - these days, only computer games or new IKEA stores warrant that kind of obsession. What's more, you couldn't imagine something so preposterous as that grand statement being allowed in the current state of the music industry. Yet Chinese Democracy has managed to make itself an event, with speculation as to when it might appear dominating the press for years, and Dr Pepper foolhardily offering a can of pop to every American if the record saw light of day in 2008. Other media more pompous than the Quietus (that's you Gigwise and the Guardian Guide) have seen fit to compile crass lists of notable events that have happened since GNR's last release. I had a great shit on March 21st 1998, as it happens, but I don't see what it has to do with this piece. So after all the waiting, the speculation, the hype, the press releases that are more about marketing campaigns than the record, will the new Guns n'Roses album actually be any good? Or will the legendarily nuts Axl Rose, without Slash and co behind him, have disappeared into bloated irrelevance? I headed down to Universal Records in Kensington to find out.

Chinese Democracy

The title track opens with mighty portents of doom, strange sounds, murmuring voices, the promise of something wonderful and terrible coming over the horizon... which, given 17 years and ten minutes hanging around in the lobby of Universal HQ, exactly what we ought to be expecting. But then, instead of the Art of War manifest in song, a rather straight-forward riff takes over, and Axl starts singing about "Iron fists" and "missionaries and visionaries". It's a solid start, nonetheless.

Shackler's Revenge

Given the title, I was hoping for a GNR sea shanty about some old salt who devotes his life to ploughing the waves in a sloop in search of his avowed enemy M Le Saucisson who gave him the peg leg back in 1793. Instead, it's a grinding beast that's -hopefully- going to be evidence of an industrial influence throughout the rest of the record; there's a lovely aggressive, snatched-at almost new-wave guitar riff too. Oddly, we get to hear Rose singing in a low register before the nasal whine of yore comes in. It does sound as if his larynx is giving him gip in his advanced years. Is that why it's taken so long? A week of vocal takes then a few months on the lozenges? Still, if this keeps up Chinese Democracy has the potential to be all that the build-up has promised it to be...

Better

Like the first track, this has a diverting opening, percussion and tremulous vocal dancing with bits and pieces of electronica. It follows on well from 'Shackler's Revenge', and gets me hoping that Rose has produced an album that'll justify the $13 million spent... But his voice starts to dominate the track, as the music becomes a murky soup beneath. It doesn't seem to know what it wants to be, this one, so many ideas coming up for air before being subsumed in the maelstrom that nothing of note manages to escape. Goes on a bit too. Uh oh.

Street of Dreams

Dizzy tinkling on the ivories, a sense of imminent bombast... for a split second you could imagine this being on one of the Illusions then... oh dear. When Rose decides to sing in a lower register it just doesn't work, an uncomfortable growl that, when he climbs steeply up to the trademarked screech, shows how the years have been unkind to that famous voice. It's hardly Rose's fault, though, use your nose, throat and chest to sing with rather than your lungs and your singing career is always going to be defeated by strain - Liam Gallagher suffers in the same way. Suddenly the piano disappears under a another indifferent bit of soloing before a marshalling yard's worth of string tracks splurges out over everything. "I don't know what I should do", Rose sings. Which is exactly the problem here, once again too many ideas gilding the lily so heavily that it sinks down into the oomska. You can hear a goodly chunk of those millions of dollar bills burning here.

If The World

Again, this is a track with too many bitty concepts that never mesh, in this case a Spanish guitar trick that's present for the start but never quite knows what to do with itself, save wave a red rag at a bull of hulking guitar before getting trampled under its ungainly hooves. Guns n'Roses made such a unique sound in the early 90s, yet metal has evolved, fractured, and been reborn so many times since then that you get the feeling that Rose doesn't quite know which bits to borrow from, and which to leave on the shelf. The muddle here seems to suggest insecurity, and it's a far cry from the bold, aggressive tones of 'Shackler's Revenge'. The Spanish guitar resurfaces at about 4.22, and you can't help but ask yourself why they bothered having it there at all.

There Was A Time

Here they go AGAIN: a choral start. That promptly disappears until a couple of seconds before the end of the track. You get the feeling that there are stacks and stacks of this sort of thing lying around, brilliant ideas that everyone forgot they'd had until they played them back a few years later, and thought might as well be used somewhere. Rose is singing about lawyers, cocaine and California, which is never going to be of much interest to us humble lay folk. Once more, the production is too confining and this portentous edifice of a track is never allowed to flex and breathe, so different from the old GNR, where brilliant musicians came together to make the ridiculous plausible, leaping across the genres in the process.

Catcher In The Rye

A song inspired by a novel that most read as part of a literate teenage rebellion perhaps suggests that Rose's personality has become trapped in his formative years by massive fame at a tender age, a Peter Pan figure holed up in his mansion since the death of his mother in 1996. Cod psychology aside, this is a generically rocking filler track - and albums this expensive, this long in the making, should not carry filler tracks. Look at the Illusions - two records with nary a duff track.

Scraped

This is a bit more like it, a big hulking riff and Rose's phrasing pretty interesting over the top of it too, even if it does get a bit uncomfortably nu-metal when he sings "no-one can make you do what you want to". The vocals dominate the track again, and when you consider that Rose is essentially performing a duet between his roar and his screech, it's once more underlined that this is very much a solo project painstakingly pieced together in the studio rather than a breathing, living, organic band.

Riad N'Bedouins

Another brighter moment, even if I've no idea what that title's all about. Interestingly, some of the music sounds like something the Manic Street Preachers might have concocted had their Guns n'Roses fascination extended into the writing for the Holy Bible .

Sorry

A ballad where Rose's voice has an effect that makes it sound like it comes from a man with slimy plastic cheeks. Despite the title, it's not a sign of a new humility from Rose, instead he sings that he's sorry for someone or other who's done him wrong. There's finally a stab at an old fashioned GNR bit of soloing, but it sounds like something Slash left back down the back of the sofa in 1989. His fluid, graceful/sleazy and inventive playing is really missed on Chinese Democracy.

I.R.S.

Who the hell sings songs about the tax man? "Wouldn't be the first time I've been robbed", Rose complains. It could be a complicated metaphor for stolen time, or something, but I doubt it. It's a pretty decent track... but "pretty decent" isn't good enough when you consider the epic, arrogant, grandiose achievement of the Illusion double whammy. Like so many front men, Rose needs a band around him, to goad him on, to reign him in, to weave louche magic around his mercurial presence. Even the crunching rhythm guitars of yore are in a different league to the generic rock plodding on display here.

Madagascar

The sleeve credits are a great read here, promising samples from Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech, Cool Hand Luke, Casualties of Ware, Seven and, er, Mel Gibson's English-bashing historical rewrite Braveheart. Strangely enough, the same "What we've got here is failure to communicate..." sample as the band used in 'Civil War' nearly two decades ago. It's a mistake, putting this muddled commentary on war/conflict/and stuff in direct contrast with the older, far superior track. Musically its more of the same, technically superb in every way, but deathly cold. There just aren't enough personalities on this record.

This I Love

The only track credited to Rose alone, this is a bit of a schlocky ballad with some dodgy rhyming going on, "goodbye/why", "light/bright/night". There are hints of Queen, but not bold enough to lift the track. More light drizzle than 'November Rain'.

Prostitute

"I'm misunderstood / Please be kind / I've done all I could" is Rose's plaintive farewell. Without a lyrics sheet (presumably locked in a Universal vault, a naked intern strapped to a TNT trigger in case anyone tries to breach it) it's hard to pick out exactly what Rose is trying to say, whether he's speaking through the mouth of a practitioner of the world's oldest profession to try and justify what he's been up to in the garden shed for all these years. Yet it's hard not to have the feeling that Chinese Democracy has been too much of a dictatorship to succeed, rigid autocracy conjuring non-existent divisions out of the map as the forces of indifference batter down the citadel. Those tattooed, bouffant rapscallions who drank and fucked and snorted and injected their way through the charts in the late 1980s were a perfect gang, five individuals (of whom Axl Rose was only one) causing a riot both onstage and in the studio. Look back and ask yourself the question, would it have even been possible to top Appetite For Destruction and the mighty Use Your Illusion pairing? Those were records made by certain, special people in a certain time - no amount of money and egotistical insanity could ever come close to replicating them. Crucially, unlike that brilliant run of albums, this is not a pop record. No doubt a sizable chunk of the GNR faithful will feel enfranchised by this, but it's hard not to see Chinese Democracy as a tragic failure. Yet, we have to ask ourselves, could it have been any other way?

THE QUIETUS


The new record from Guns N' Roses is a scorcher. Hard to believe I'm actually writing these words, but Guns N' Roses is back. Axl Rose rules and his new 14 tracks are going to make lots of non-believers freak out. Thursday, we had a sneak preview of the record and man oh man, the first single Chinese Democracy does not indicate the direction of the album: the thing is vintage GNR, and makes you think that Slash, Duff and Izzy were little more than well-dressed sidemen. We'll have a full review posted on Tuesday, but after giving this thing a test drive, let no man question the genius of Axl -- Guns N' Roses, the best album of 2008? Could very well be. Rock on.


[NOTE: This isn't a proper review, but a preview of the album. The writer was given the chance to listen to the album once in its entirety. These are his first impressions. We will have a full review once the album is released.]


• Chinese Democracy -- This song is terrible. The over-dubbed Axl vocals are grating and the title is horrid, this is what made people believe the record would blow.

• Shackler's Revenge – Vintage Appetite. Play this song for any GNR fan and I guarantee they will love it. Huge, huge monster riffs.

• Better -- The best song on the record? Could be. You can almost hear Duff in the background and it has that sweeping optimism of Rocket Queen. This is Axl doing his sensitive thug thing, hard rock has really sounded this good.

• Street of Dreams -- The album's November Rain. Axl on the piano, and that voice: Still better than anything on the radio today. The Killers? Snow Patrol? Feist? Man, listening to this, you can almost see the hurricane in the video. The wedding with Erin Everly and Slash with his top hat and no shirt? Here's some lyrics: "I never wanted you to be so full of anger/I never wanted you to be someone else."

• If the World -- A groovy track with a Blaxploitation monster guitar riff. Sounds like Heavy Metal Shaft.

• There Was a Time -- The record's first cocaine reference, at seven minutes this song changes tones more times than a 17-year-old girl's cell phone.

• Catcher N' the Rye -- Embarrassing title. Pretty lame song.

• Scraped -- This has Axl sort of rapping with himself and is pretty lame. Additionally, on the album's credits there are seven people credited with "additional Pro Tools."

• Riad N' the Bedouins -- This sounds like Alice in Chains, who, like Weezer, is thanked in the album's liner notes. Why does Axl thank Weezer? Who knows. But maybe Spike Jonze could make a video for this song.

• Sorry -- Another awesome ballad. This record is so, so good. Here's some lyrics: "You don't know why I never give in/To hell with the pressure/I'm not caving in."

• I.R.S. -- Great rock n' roll song. Axl has one of the best voices of all-time. At three minutes, the song turns into a juggernaut.

• Madagascar -- This represents both the best and worst of Axl. Why is he sampling Martin Luther King? The song is pretty straight-forward awesome, but Axl makes it over-blown. Love the ambition. Love the song. But clearances for MLK - as well as Braveheart and David Fincher's Seven - probably are one of the inconsequential additions that kept this really great record from coming out for so long.

• This I Love -- Such a great Axl piano ballad, and again at 3-minutes in it becomes a rock n' roll anthem. The Axl Rose high voice is better than anyone from Thom Yorke to Chris Martin. And how much better is Guns N' Roses than either of those whimpy, navel-gazing British bands?

• Prostitute -- Again, echoes of Rocket Queen, probably the best song off Appetite for Destruction.

OK: this record is no Appetite, although we only got a single listen and will write more when the disc is sent out for a proper review. Mr. Brownstone? Welcome to the Jungle? Sweet Child? For men of a certain age, those songs are as ingrained in our consciousness as Family Ties, 21 Jump Street, Alf and Arsenio Hall. I love this new Guns N' Roses record. And if you remember when video music channels actually played music videos, you probably will, too.

By Ben Kaplan - NATIONAL POST


I’ve had a listen to the long overdue Chinese Democracy and can confirm it’s one of the most unashamedly over-the-top rock records ever.

It is so lavish that even the contribution of Queen’s BRIAN MAY, a scorching guitar solo, was left on the cutting room floor by mastermind AXL ROSE.

The poodle-haired guitarist told me: “It is a shame. I put quite a lot of work in and was proud of it.

“But I could understand if Axl wants to have an album which reflects the work of the members of the band as it is right now.”

The CD, out on November 24, has taken on mythical status. I didn’t think it would see the light of day.

But the band’s manager, ANDY GOULD, explained: “When they asked MICHELANGELO to paint the Sistine Chapel they didn’t say, ‘Can you do it in the fourth quarter?’

“Great art sometimes takes time.” I’m inclined to agree. The album is heavy in places but also shows Rose’s vulnerable side.

Stormers Shackler’s Revenge and Scraped, with Axl howling: “Don’t you try and stop us now, cos I won’t let you”, and berserk thrash-metal track Riad N’ The Bedouins, will please headbangers.

On the other hand, Street Of Dreams, with its sweeping strings and tinkling pianos, could have featured on THE BEATLES’ classic album Abbey Road.

Soppy ballad If The World sounds like a vintage Bond theme.

The most startling offering, This I Love, is like a 19th Century waltz while Sorry could be the ultimate power ballad.

Chinese Democracy is lavish, ludicrous...and quite brilliant.

No one else on the planet is making music like this at the moment and label Universal are so confident that they have pressed an unprecedented three million copies ahead of the CD’s release.

The fact Axl is the only one left from the original line-up won’t stop it flying off the shelves.

But there’s one place you won’t be able to buy the record — it’s already been banned in China.

THE SUN


Notes on the new Guns N' Roses album

Earlier today we attended a listening party for the new Guns N' Roses album, Chinese Democracy, which has been an incredible 15 years in the making. Without further ado, here are our first impressions:


The majority of the album features the same industrial beats and heavy guitars of the single - anyone hoping for the sleazy Sunset Strip sound of their debut may be disappointed. In the main, it veers between NIN-style industrial rock and piano ballads.


You like guitar solos? Well there's more here than you could shake a KFC bucket at. The most noteworthy are the outros to 'Shackler's Revenge' and 'This Is Love', both which will have you dusting off your air guitar moves.


There are a couple of attempts to match the bombast of 'November Rain', and with several tracks featuring orchestras and Elton John-style piano, Axl will need a massive dry ice machine come the world tour.


'Streets Of Dreams' sounds in parts like Bon Jovi, features some ball-clenching squeals from Axl and has a huge key change right at the end that even Mariah Carey would consider crass.


If you ever wanted to hear Guns N' Roses do a Bond theme then skip straight to 'Madagascar', which features trumpets, tons of strings and an overblown crescendo. It also nabs samples from Martin Luther King speeches and Mel Gibson in Braveheart.


Axl shows his romantic side on 'This I Love', crooning: "I heard she'd never leave me, please God you must believe me." Aww, sweet!


'Catcher In The Rye' should probably be the next single. It has an operatic, stadium rock feel and sounds like it could have sprung from Axl's recording sessions with Brian May.


We're not sure what the barmiest track is, but the near-emo sound of 'Better' and mixture of dub, Spanish strings and robotic drums that is 'If The World' are prime contenders.

Guns N' Roses release Chinese Democracy on November 24, with our full review to come nearer to release date. Get your cans of Dr Pepper at the ready!

By Alex Fletcher, Entertainment Reporter - DIGITAL SPY



Guns N' Roses codependents are rejoicing over Chinese Democracy's long-awaited release, perhaps the most-delayed album in rock history.

But think, for a second, about our fragile economy: According to a 2005 New York Times story, Axl Rose spent more than $13 million recording this thing; if left unsatisfied, his appetite for construction might keep the West Hollywood service industry afloat for another decade. Is now really the best time for this gravy train to pull into the station?

You bet.

An outrageously overblown pop-metal extravaganza, Chinese Democracy feels like a perfect epitaph for all the absurdity and nonsense of the George W. Bush era -- one final blowout before Principal Obama takes our idiocy away.

The music toggles between two primary modes: grinding industrial rock and keys-and-strings balladry. (Imagine Rammstein covering Wings, basically.) Yet to that blueprint Rose and his battalion of musicians (including no fewer than five guitarists) append every trick new money can buy: hip-hop beats, Middle Eastern–influenced riffs, space-cowboy atmospherics, and, of course, Rose's still-astounding vocals, often multitracked into a paranoid boys chorus.

Singling out highlights seems antithetical to Rose's double-widescreen vision, but with their memorable melodies, "Better," "This I Love," and "Riad N' the Bedouins" (say what?) rise above the aural onslaught.

Blast ’em at top volume as you wave good-bye to our yellow brick road.

Mikael Wood - SPIN


In their heyday, Guns N' Roses were remarkable for their ability to ride catastrophe. Following Use Your Illusion I and II, however, in 1991, huge fissures developed in the band, which even they couldn't endure. One by one, the original band members left, most fatefully guitarist Slash, apparently unable to endure the “dictatorial” tendencies of singer Axl Rose.

Work on this, their first album proper since then, actually began in the mid-90s. However, it's been made in such fits and starts, with such a liquid line-up (even Brian May dropped in at one point) that it would be a miracle of Sistine proportions if it amounted to anything coherent and consistent.
Such worries are, sadly, not without foundation. Soundwise, Chinese Democracy is all over the place. Tracks actually vary in volume according to their disparate ages, with the likes of “I.R.S.” (around on bootleg for years) quite clearly having been cut and finished years before the track that precedes it.

A similarly tangled story accompanies the music. Chinese Democracy is evidently the work of a man becoming progressively more interested in avant-rock forms: virtually every track on Chinese Democracy starts out sounding like it might amount to something that extends GNR’s parameters in truly unexpected directions (noir-ish ambient, electronic, even brass band on “Madagascar”). However, Rose's experimental hankerings generally give out after about 10 seconds. Oh Slash, where art thou?

Scouring the album for redeeming moments, one could cite the steely, futurist angst of “Shackler's Revenge” and the pianistic “This I Love”, which in making Elton John and Freddie Mercury sound like Chas N' Dave, must at least merit some kind of high camp award. And in “Prostitute” Rose offers a hint of atonement which excites fleeting sympathy. What kind of surreal pass has your life come to, after all, when you get involved in a fistfight with Tommy Hilfiger?
With rumours that the original G N'R are set to reform next year, and mega metal currently in the ascendancy, the insanity looks set to carry on regardless.

2*

DAVID STUBBS - UNCUT


How much idle conjecture has there been over Chinese Democracy? Axl Rose has had 17 years to turn this vanity project into absolute gold. It has to be a masterpiece. It has to be the best album of the 21st century.
I say “vanity project” because Rose is the only founding member remaining in Guns N’ Roses. I say “vanity project” because he has taken 17 bloody years to write one album!
After all this time, it would be a travesty to give the fans exactly what they’re expecting, and by and large, the fans are expecting an album which sounds like Guns N’ Roses. Axl always maintained that he was taking his time in order to create something new; something special.
This year has already seen albums from two of the greatest hard rock bands of the lasats twenty years. Metallica went back to their roots and AC/DC decided to retain the usage of the words “Rock” and “Black” in as many songs as possible.
Both albums were hugely successful. Neither album reinvented either band’s sound.
The last proper thing we heard from Gn’R was in 1999 when they contributed the huge, overblown, industrial-sounding ‘Oh My God’ to the End Of Days soundtrack. It sounded promising. It gave us the hope that Chinese Democracy wasn’t far away. Oh how we laugh now.
The next thing we hear is the title track from Chinese Democracy. It sounds like Marilyn Manson playing The Darkness’ ‘I Believe In A Thing Called Love’. Everybody shrugged and said the rest of the album will be great. The rest of the album had to be great.
‘Shackler’s Revenge’ follows on with the electronic, industrial theme but does it better than the single. The fantastically meaty production is the first thing that hits you and Axl is starting to sound a bit more like Axl.
‘Better’ is an evasive musical manoeuvre as a gentle intro makes way for an explosion. The song grows and grows and could definitely work with a video. Single alert!
Another leftward shift is found on ‘There Was A Time’. Judging by the production notes, it’s the song that had the most time spent on it but it sounds nothing like what you might expect from Guns. Rolling thunder and the sound of thousands of cans of fizzy pop are opening. Interesting song.
The bass-driven ‘Riad N’ Bedouins’ and the superbly heavy ‘Scraped’ are mid-album pleasers but their unfamiliarity in both sound and style means that the full effect of these songs will only be felt in a few months, if indeed the album draws us in enough for a repeat listen.
‘If The World’ could be a Bond theme, but it isn’t. It’s not ‘Live & Let Die’ or ‘Goldfinger’ but it’s definitely going for the same theme. Indeed, Oscar-tipped spy drama, Body Of Lies has it on its soundtrack. Not Bond though, is it.
It’s like Axl Rose has the ambition and he has the quality and he definitely has had the time, but he just hasn’t maximised the potential. Every track seems to miss the mark a bit. Instead of hitting the bright yellow bullseye, the arrow flies into the red, or even the blue.
What has Axl Rose done with Guns N’ Roses? He has made that new(ish) sound that he wanted in the most part but then you get tracks like ‘Catcher In The Rye’ (you’ll be singing along to this) and ‘Madagascar’ (the new, less good ‘November Rain’) which sound like the Gn’R that we know.
Is that really what we want, though? Is that really what Axl Rose spent all this time doing? After all, he crushed Slash by turning down his work in favour of a new direction. To retain the old sound would be to turn the Chinese Democracy into a long-awaited hypocrisy.
Axl’s voice means that it still definitely does sound like Guns, but the solos seem tacked on. It’s like Rose couldn’t find riffs up to Slash’s standards so he trawled the LA guitarists-with-one-name agency and only got Buckethead and Bumblefoot. Not quite the same.
You will buy Chinese Democracy. You will listen to it as soon as you get home. Then you’ll sit there and think disappointedly, “Well, it’s not crap but…” Then it will stay on your CD rack and in your iTunes because you’ll have forgotten about it.
3/6

Raziq Rauf TRASH HITS