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- A Private Eye
- Rep: 77
Re: Chinese Democracy official reviews thread
Guns N' Roses
Chinese Democracy
RS: 4of 5 Stars Average User Rating: 4.5of 5 Stars
2008
Let's get right to it: The first Guns n' Roses album of new, original songs since the first Bush administration is a great, audacious, unhinged and uncompromising hard-rock record. In other words, it sounds a lot like the Guns n' Roses you know. At times, it's the clenched-fist five that made 1987's perfect storm, Appetite for Destruction; more often, it's the one sprawled across the maxed-out CDs of 1991's Use Your Illusion I and II, but here compressed into a convulsive single disc of supershred guitars, orchestral fanfares, hip-hop electronics, metallic tabernacle choirs and Axl Rose's still-virile, rusted-siren singing.
If Rose ever had a moment's doubt or repentance over what Chinese Democracy has cost him in time (13 years), money (14 studios are listed in the credits) and body count — including the exit of every other founding member of the band — he left no room for it in these 14 songs. "I bet you think I'm doin' this all for my health," Rose cracks through the saturation-bombing guitars in "I.R.S.," one of several glancing references on the album to what he knows a lot of people think of him: that Rose, now 46, has spent the last third of his life running off the rails, in half-light. But when he snaps, "All things are possible/I am unstoppable," in the thumper "Scraped," that's not loony hubris — just a good old rock & roll "fuck you," the kind that made him and the old band hot and famous in the first place.
Something else Rose broadcasts over and over on Chinese Democracy: Restraint is for suckers. There is plenty of familiar guitar firepower — the stabbing-dagger lick that opens the first track, "Chinese Democracy," the sand-devil fuzz in "Riad N' the Bedouins" and the looping squeals over the grand anguish of "Street of Dreams." But what Slash and Izzy Stradlin used to do with two guitars now takes a wall of 'em. On some tracks, Rose has up to five guys — Robin Finck, Buckethead, Paul Tobias, Ron "Bumblefoot" Thal and Richard Fortus — riffing and soloing in broad, saw-toothed blurs. And that's no drag. I still think the wild, superstuffed "Oh My God" — the early Chinese Democracy track wasted on the 1999 End of Days soundtrack — beats everything on Guns n' Roses' 1993 covers album, The Spaghetti Incident?
Most of these songs also go through multiple U-turns in personality, as if Rose kept trying new approaches to a hook or a bridge and then decided, "What the hell, they're all cool." "Better" starts with what sounds like hip-hop voicemail — severely pinched guitar, drum machine and a near-falsetto Rose ("No one ever told me when/I was alone/They just thought I'd know better") — before blowing up into vintage Sunset Strip wallop. "If the World" has Buckethead plucking acoustic Spanish guitar over a blaxploitation-film groove, while Rose shows that he still holds a long-breath vowel — part torture victim, part screaming jet — like no other rock singer.
And there is so much going on in "There Was a Time" — strings and Mellotron, a full-strength choir and Rose's overdubbed sour-growl harmonies, wah-wah guitar and a false ending (more choir) — that it's easy to believe Rose spent most of the past decade on that arrangement alone. But it is never a mess, more like a loud mass of bad memories and hard lessons. In the first lines, Rose goes back to a beginning much like his own — "Broken glass and cigarettes/ Writin' on the wall/It was a bargain for the summer/An' I thought I had it all" — then piles on the wreckage along with the orchestra and guitars. By the end, it's one big melt of missing and kiss-off ("If I could go back in time . . . But I don't want to know it now"). If this is the Guns n' Roses that Rose kept hearing in his head all this time, it is obvious why two guitars, bass and drums were never going to be enough.
It is plain, too, that he thinks this Guns n' Roses is a band, as much as the one that recorded "Welcome to the Jungle," "Sweet Child O' Mine," "Used to Love Her" and "Civil War." The voluminous credits that come with Chinese Democracy certainly give detailed credit where it is due. My favorite: "Initial arrangement suggestions: Youth on 'Madagascar." Rose takes the big one — "Lyrics N' Melodies by Axl Rose" — but shares full-song bylines with other players on all but one track. Bassist Tommy Stinson plays on nearly every song, and keyboardist Dizzy Reed, the only survivor from the Illusion lineup, does the Elton John-style piano honors on "Street of Dreams."
But Rose still sings a lot about the power of sheer, solitary will even when he throws himself into a bigger fight, like "Chinese Democracy." In "Madagascar," which Rose has played live for several years now, he samples both Dr. Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech and dialogue from Cool Hand Luke. And at the end of the album, on the bluntly titled "Prostitute," Rose veers from an almost conversational tenor, over a ticking-bomb shuffle, to five-guitar barrage, orchestral lightning and righteous howl: "Ask yourself/Why I would choose/To prostitute myself/To live with fortune and shame." To him, the long march to Chinese Democracy was not about paranoia and control. It was about saying "I won't" when everyone else insisted, "You must." You may debate whether any rock record is worth that extreme self-indulgence. Actually, the most rock & roll thing about Chinese Democracy is he doesn't care if you do.
- A Private Eye
- Rep: 77
Re: Chinese Democracy official reviews thread
Rock review: Guns N' Roses, Chinese Democracy(Geffen/Universal) Dan Silver
Guns N' Roses Chinese Democracy Geffen/Universal Imagine if 'Chinese Democracy' had never come to pass. Axl Rose would have retained an air of Machiavellian mystery and we would've remained complicit fall guys for the best joke played on the music industry. Now that this half-cocked hard rock anachronism is here, the only laughs are unintentional. Axl: you blew it.
2/5
Re: Chinese Democracy official reviews thread
Published: 15 Nov 2008
GUNS N’ ROSES’ first album of new material in 17 years makes QUEEN at their extravagant peak sound like a choir of monks.
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 (UK)
Re: Chinese Democracy official reviews thread
The Quietus Track By Track Review.....
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 foolhardy 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?
Re: Chinese Democracy official reviews thread
BBC Review: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7730075.stm
Is a broken heart to blame for the 15-year delay to Guns N' Roses new album?
Throughout the course of Chinese Democracy, Axl Rose repeatedly refers to a "change of heart" and his "lonely tear drops".
"I just can't let it die, all the pain inside," he eventually blurts out on This I Love.
But if his mind hasn't been fully devoted to music over the past decade-and-a-half, it doesn't show.
This record is an uncompromising, fully-focused, hard rock monster.
At times, it will rattle the rafters with its ferocious riffs. At others, you will laugh out loud at the ridiculously overblown melodrama.
In other words, it's business as usual for Guns N' Roses.
Scattergun
Things kick off with the title track. Already heavily previewed on radio, it opens with a montage of sirens and Chinese dialogue before bursting into life with a riff of speaker-endangering proportions and Rose's trademark falsetto squeal.
It's followed by the pounding Shackler's Revenge, whose heavily distorted guitar shows Rose has been paying attention to the innovations of Tom Morello and Matt Bellamy.
In just three and a half minutes, it shoots off in hundreds of different directions, encompassing growled, paranoiac verses, off-kilter digital squeals and an anthemic chorus.
This is a trick that Rose repeats over and over on Chinese Democracy. Almost all the tracks have a scattergun approach to song structure, incorporating a vast array of movements, themes and motifs.
Along the way, we get choirs, brass bands, hip-hop beats, mellotrons, found sounds, pulsing synths, film samples and something rather ominously called "sub bass".
The credit list for one song - the Bond theme-esque There Was A Time - runs to 33 lines on the CD booklet. A total of six people play guitar on the track. Two of them get solos.
It is a long way from the scrappy garage band formed in Los Angeles three decades ago.
Low expectations
What's surprising, however, is that the songs survive intact despite this surfeit of ideas and contributors.
By rights, Chinese Democracy should have been an unholy mess. But Rose seems to have learned his lesson after the sprawling self-indulgence of 1991's Use Your Illusion.
Songs like IRS and Raid N' The Bedouins are lean and compact, edited down to the bare essentials, packing the maximum punch per pound.
But, let's be clear, this is by no means the equal of the 28 million-selling Appetite For Destruction, nor does it contain anything as radio friendly as Paradise City or November Rain.
Indeed, if initial reactions are positive, that's partly because expectations were so low after the record's troubled gestation.
On the downside, there is a surfeit of cheesy ballads, beginning with the terribly overwrought Street Of Dreams.
The opening piano chords bring to mind nothing more than Sir Elton John, while Rose oversings lines about "stardust on my feet" in a voice that would make an X Factor auditionee cringe.
Sorry, another break-up song, aims for grandiose but ends up sounding ridiculous - like Pink Floyd covered by Metallica.
And, for all of its ambitious bombast, there's no disguising the fact that There Was A Time veers dangerously close to becoming Bon Jovi's Blaze Of Glory.
ose has already predicted the reaction to these songs. "I'm trying to do something different," he told Rolling Stone in 2006.
"Some of the arrangements are kind of like Queen. Some people are going to say it doesn't sound like Guns N' Roses."
Actually, he's wrong about that. This does sound like a Guns N' Roses album, but it's a sadly compromised one.
The filthy swagger is gone - perhaps understandable now that Rose is 46. But Chinese Democracy also misses the clean, tuneful riffs that Slash and Izzy Stradlin used to provide.
Too often, guitar lines sound like technical exercises - fingers running up and down the fretboard at the expense of melody.
And when several songs plump for "na na na" backing vocals, you find yourself wondering why no-one had time to finish off the lyrics.
Ultimately, however, there is nothing here that will irrevocably tarnish the Guns N' Roses name.
Had it come out directly after the band's last album, 1993's The Spaghetti Incident?, it would have been hailed as a triumphant return to form.
Or - just perhaps - it would have been branded irrelevant in a world where grunge, hip-hop and industrial rock where in the ascendancy.
In 2008, the cogs of the musical world have turned full circle, and Axl Rose is releasing his long-awaited opus just as games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band (which features Shackler's Revenge on its tracklisting) bring hard rock back into people's living rooms.
Maybe all the heartache was worth it.
Re: Chinese Democracy official reviews thread
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blog … 08014.aspx
pretty good one but I must say after reading about 6-7 of these, it gets old. 
