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Re: Chinese Democracy official reviews thread
Rating: Four Out Of Five
Let’s get one thing straight: Dark Side of the Moon on crack probably wouldn’t justify the 14-year, $13 million wait for Guns N’ Roses’ legendarily delayed Chinese Democracy. To many, Axl Rose’s ludicrous soap opera of delays, failed tours, and endless lineup changes is just as interesting as the idea that an actual album would emerge from it. Rose is the only link between the band that recorded the 1987 hard-rock landmark Appetite for Destruction and the one currently calling itself Guns N’ Roses, which features members of Primus, Nine Inch Nails, and the Replacements, among others.
And if Chinese Democracy had been the train wreck most predicted and hoped it would be, that fact would be relevant. But somehow or other, Axl has managed to turn Guns N’ Roses 2.0 into a real band, one that has made not only the best GNR album since Appetite but the best hard rock album of the last several years. Chinese Democracy’s 14 tracks are heavy but infectiously melodic, dirty but grandiose—in short, everything the original Gunners were great at, updated for a post-NIN rock landscape and stuffed into a filler-free 71-minute rush of hot guitars, hip-hop beats, and orchestral bombast. Slash and Duff McKagan aren’t listed in the album’s voluminous credits, but the material on Chinese Democracy is strong enough that you don’t care.
At the time of the original band’s dissolution around 1994, Rose’s fascination with industrial and electronic music put him at odds with his bandmates, who saw themselves as their generation’s answer to Led Zeppelin. Since then, the other members have made their cases (Slash’s Snakepit, Velvet Revolver), with varying degrees of success. Meanwhile, Rose has spent the entire Clinton and Bush administrations reworking and tinkering with these songs, pouring every fiber of his being into proving that he did not break up the premiere hard rock band of the late 1980s for nothing. The weight of this task can be heard all throughout Chinese Democracy, from the razor-sharp riffing that opens it to the anguished plea (“please be kind/I’ve done all I should”) that closes it.
Chinese Democracy is pretty evenly divided between tricked-out rockers and “November Rain”-style epic ballads. Every track is stuffed to the brink with walls of guitars, layers of strings, and choruses of Axls. From the sound of it, every single idea that was kicked around during the 14-year recording sessions was used somewhere on the album. Rose’s storied perfectionism has ensured that not a hair is out of place in the songs’ almost comically intricate arrangements. Still, Buckethead’s stunning solo in “There Was a Time” and Robin Finck’s soulful turn in “Catcher in the Rye” manage to cut through the Steely Dan-slick production with the kind of brute force the original Guns were know for.
Rose’s inimitable devil-woman shriek is all over the album, in better form than even the most optimistic diehards could have dared hope. The pulverizing bridge of standout cut “Better” and the vocal acrobatics of the ending of “Street of Dreams” find Rose able to elicit the same chills as he did on “My Michelle” and “Rocket Queen” two decades ago.
Many of these songs have been floating around for years (“Madagascar” and the title track have been live staples since 2001, while “I.R.S.,” “Better,” and “There Was a Time” leaked in demo form in early 2006), but finally hearing them in order makes them feel fresh. The most overstuffed of the ballads, “Catcher in the Rye,” gives way to “Scraped” and “Riad N’ The Bedouins,” two searing rockers that would sit comfortably on Appetite. “Street of Dreams” is Rose’s update of “Estranged,” while the utterly bizarre funk-metal-flamenco hybrid “If the World” comes further out of left field than anything on the sprawling, wildly eclectic Use Your Illusion albums. Rose is at his most self-indulgent on the melodramatic “This I Love,” where he croons over layers of piano, strings, and harp before a gorgeous, lyrical Finck solo ushers the song safely back into “Don’t Cry” territory. The album’s epic closer, “Prostitute,” takes the entire thing to its logical conclusion, piling on drum loops, interlocking riffs, orchestral fireworks, and synth effects with absolutely zero restraint as Rose asks himself “what I would do to prostitute myself/to live with fortune and shame.”
It is obvious from listening to Chinese Democracy that nobody involved approached it as the Axl Rose solo album detractors have long said it would be. Underneath all the studio trickery, this is the work of a band, and a damn good one. The five guitarists credited (Finck, Buckethead, Ron Thal, Richard Fortus, and Paul Tobias) trade licks and solos the way Slash and Izzy Stradlin used to, except now there are five of them. Bassist Tommy Stinson and keyboardists Chris Pitman and Dizzy Reed (the only holdover from the Use Your Illusion-era lineup) play on nearly every track, and Rose shares most of the writing credits with other members. The genius of Appetite was that it injected bluesy swagger and punk attitude back into hard rock at a time when the genre was dominated by hair-spray hacks like Poison and Winger; similarly, Chinese Democracy injects classic-GNR swagger back into a somewhat tired metal landscape, with a new cast of players but with Rose’s singular howl intact.
Ultimately, Chinese Democracy is the only record Axl Rose could have made. He was never content to stay in one place, but he is a rocker at heart, and the ambition and scope of this music puts the warmed-over cock rock of Slash and McKagan’s Velvet Revolver to shame. His hermetic behavior, years of delays and false promises, and erratic live performances have made him rock’s most worn-out punchline, but on Chinese Democracy, Axl gets the last laugh.
http://onethirtybpm.com/2008/11/18/guns … democracy/
By Chuck Klosterman
November 19th, 2008
Guest reviewer Chuck Klosterman is the author of five books, including Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey In Rural North Dakota and the new novel Downtown Owl. There is no one in the world more qualified to review the exhaustingly anticipated new Guns N' Roses album than he is.
Reviewing Chinese Democracy is not like reviewing music. It's more like reviewing a unicorn. Should I primarily be blown away that it exists at all? Am I supposed to compare it to conventional horses? To a rhinoceros? Does its pre-existing mythology impact its actual value, or must it be examined inside a cultural vacuum, as if this creature is no more (or less) special than the remainder of the animal kingdom? I've been thinking about this record for 15 years; during that span, I've thought about this record more than I've thought about China, and maybe as much as I've thought about the principles of democracy. This is a little like when that grizzly bear finally ate Timothy Treadwell: Intellectually, he always knew it was coming. He had to. His very existence was built around that conclusion. But you still can't psychologically prepare for the bear who eats you alive, particularly if the bear wears cornrows.
Here are the simple things about Chinese Democracy: Three of the songs are astonishing. Four or five others are very good. The vocals are brilliantly recorded, and the guitar playing is (generally) more interesting than the guitar playing on the Use Your Illusion albums. Axl Rose made some curious (and absolutely unnecessary) decisions throughout the assembly of this project, but that works to his advantage as often as it detracts from the larger experience. So: Chinese Democracy is good. Under any halfway normal circumstance, I would give it an A.
But nothing about these circumstances is normal.
For one thing, Chinese Democracy is (pretty much) the last Old Media album we'll ever contemplate in this context—it's the last album that will be marketed as a collection of autonomous-but-connected songs, the last album that will be absorbed as a static manifestation of who the band supposedly is, and the last album that will matter more as a physical object than as an Internet sound file. This is the end of that. But the more meaningful reason Chinese Democracy is abnormal is because of a) the motives of its maker, and b) how those motives embargoed what the definitive product eventually became. The explanation as to why Chinese Democracy took so long to complete is not simply because Axl Rose is an insecure perfectionist; it's because Axl Rose self-identifies as a serious, unnatural artist. He can't stop himself from anticipating every possible reaction and interpretation of his work. I suspect he cares less about the degree to which people like his music, and more about how it is taken, regardless of the listener's ultimate judgment. This is why he was so paralyzed by the construction of Chinese Democracy—he can't write or record anything without obsessing over how it will be received, both by a) the people who think he's an unadulterated genius, and b) the people who think he's little more than a richer, red-haired Stephen Pearcy. All of those disparate opinions have identical value to him. So I will take Chinese Democracy as seriously as Axl Rose would hope, and that makes it significantly less simple. At this juncture in history, rocking is not enough.
The weirdest (yet more predictable) aspect of Chinese Democracy is the way 60 percent of the lyrics seem to actively comment on the process of making the album itself. The rest of the vocal material tends to suggest some kind of abstract regret over an undefined romantic relationship punctuated by betrayal, but that might just be the way all hard-rock songs seem when the singer plays a lot of piano and only uses pronouns. The craziest track, "Sorry," resembles spooky Pink Floyd and is probably directed toward former GNR drummer Steven Adler, although I suppose it might be about Slash or Stephanie Seymour or David Geffen. It could even be about Jon Pareles, for all I fucking know—Axl's enemy list is pretty Nixonian at this point. The most uplifting songs are "Street Of Dreams" (a leaked song previously titled "The Blues") and the exceptionally satisfying "Catcher In The Rye" (a softer, more sophisticated re-working of "Yesterdays" that occupies a conceptual self-awareness in the vein of Elton John or mid-period Queen). The fragile ballad "This I Love" is sad, melodramatic, and pleasurably traditional. There are many moments where it's impossible to tell who Axl is talking to, so it feels like he's talking to himself (and inevitably about himself). There's not much cogent storytelling, but it's linear and compelling. The best description of the overall literary quality of the lyrics would probably be "effectively narcissistic."
As for the music—well, that's actually much better than anticipated. It doesn't sound dated or faux-industrial, and the guitar shredding that made the final version (which I'm assuming is still predominantly Buckethead) is alien and perverse. A song like "Shackler's Revenge" is initially average, until you get to the solo—then it becomes the sonic equivalent of a Russian robot wrestling a reticulating python. Whenever people lament the dissolution of the original Guns N' Roses, the person they always focus on is Slash, and that makes sense. (His unrushed blues metal was the group's musical vortex.) But it's actually better that Slash is not on this album. What's cool about Chinese Democracy is that it truly does sound like a new enterprise, and I can't imagine that being the case if Slash were dictating the sonic feel of every riff. The GNR members Rose misses more are Izzy Stradlin (who effortlessly wrote or co-wrote many of the band's most memorable tunes) and Duff McKagan, the underappreciated bassist who made Appetite For Destruction so devastating. Because McKagan worked in numerous Seattle-based bands before joining Guns N' Roses, he became the de facto arranger for many of those pre-Appetite tracks, and his philosophy was always to take the path of least resistance. He pushed the songs in whatever direction felt most organic. But Rose is the complete opposite. He takes the path of most resistance. Sometimes it seems like Axl believes every single Guns N' Roses song needs to employ every single thing that Guns N' Roses has the capacity to do—there needs to be a soft part, a hard part, a falsetto stretch, some piano plinking, some R&B bullshit, a little Judas Priest, subhuman sound effects, a few Robert Plant yowls, dolphin squeaks, wind, overt sentimentality, and a caustic modernization of the blues. When he's able to temporarily balance those qualities (which happens on the title track and on "I.R.S.," the album's two strongest rock cuts), it's sprawling and entertaining and profoundly impressive. The soaring vocals crush everything. But sometimes Chinese Democracy suffers from the same inescapable problem that paralyzed proto-epics like "Estranged" and "November Rain": It's as if Axl is desperately trying to get some unmakeable dream song from inside his skull onto the CD, and the result is an overstuffed maelstrom that makes all the punk dolts scoff. His ambition is noble, yet wildly unrealistic. It's like if Jeff Lynne tried to make Out Of The Blue sound more like Fun House, except with jazz drumming and a girl singer from Motown.
Throughout Chinese Democracy, the most compelling question is never, "What was Axl doing here?" but "What did Axl think he was doing here?" The tune "If The World" sounds like it should be the theme to a Roger Moore-era James Bond movie, all the way down to the title. On "Scraped," there's a vocal bridge that sounds strikingly similar to a vocal bridge from the 1990 Extreme song "Get The Funk Out." On the aforementioned "Sorry," Rose suddenly sings an otherwise innocuous line ("But I don't want to do it") in some bizarre, quasi-Transylvanian accent, and I cannot begin to speculate as to why. I mean, one has to assume Axl thought about all of these individual choices a minimum of a thousand times over the past 15 years. Somewhere in Los Angles, there's gotta be 400 hours of DAT tape with nothing on it except multiple versions of the "Sorry" vocal. So why is this the one we finally hear? What finally made him decide, "You know, I've weighed all my options and all their potential consequences, and I'm going with the Mexican vampire accent. This is the vision I will embrace. But only on that one line! The rest of it will just be sung like a non-dead human."†Often, I don't even care if his choices work or if they fail. I just want to know what Rose hoped they would do.
On "Madagascar," he samples MLK (possible restitution for "One In A Million"?) and (for the second time in his career) the movie Cool Hand Luke. Considering that the only people who will care about Rose's preoccupation with Cool Hand Luke are those already obsessed with his iconography, the doomed messianic message of that film must deeply (and predictably) resonate with his very being. But how does that contribute to "Madagascar," a meteorological metaphor about all those unnamed people who wanted to stop him from making Chinese Democracy in the insane manner he saw fit? Sometimes listening to this album feels like watching the final five minutes of the Sopranos finale. There's no acceptable answer to these types of hypotheticals.
Still, I find myself impressed by how close Chinese Democracy comes to fulfilling the absurdly impossible expectation it self-generated, and I not-so-secretly wish this had actually been a triple album. I've maintained a decent living by making easy jokes about Axl Rose for the past 10 years, but what's the final truth? The final truth is this: He makes the best songs. They sound the way I want songs to sound. A few of them seem idiotic at the beginning, but I love the way they end. Axl Rose put so much time and effort into proving that he was super-talented that the rest of humanity forgot he always had been. And that will hurt him. This record may tank commercially. Some people will slaughter Chinese Democracy, and for all the reasons you expect. But he did a good thing here.
Grade: A-
- metallex78
- Rep: 194
Re: Chinese Democracy official reviews thread
"the guitar playing is (generally) more interesting than the guitar playing on the Use Your Illusion albums"
I dunno, but I find this hard to take seriously. The Illusion albums have some of the best rock guitar riffs and solos ever recorded, and while there is some interesting playing across CD, I wouldn't say it's better than what's on UYI.
Re: Chinese Democracy official reviews thread
hard to accept that people may like the album....
No, it's hard to accept that what fans are calling a cluttered mess has more interesting guitar parts than the only (if the record still stands) 2 albums by the same band to be number 1 and 2. It's ok that this guy likes it...that's actually easy to accept. It's even ok that he thinks it's more interesting on guitar than UYI is. He's as entitled to his opinion as the rest of us are...he's no more qualified than most of us are (in fact I'd argue less qualified than most of us are) to make a comparison between the 2 since we are much more intimately familiar with both pieces than he is.
The fans that prefer the new band (not to mention the fans that prefer the old band) can't even agree on liking it. That's a pretty telling tale...far more damning than anything I could say or some reviewer could write. If the people that desperately want the album to succeed can't agree on what songs are good and what songs aren't (though almost every one of them will admit there are some good and some bad ones), how do you think the rest of the world is going to view the album? If we aren't collectively blown away by anything on the album...
Re: Chinese Democracy official reviews thread
madagas wrote:hard to accept that people may like the album....
No, it's hard to accept that what fans are calling a cluttered mess has more interesting guitar parts than the only (if the record still stands) 2 albums by the same band to be number 1 and 2. It's ok that this guy likes it...that's actually easy to accept. It's even ok that he thinks it's more interesting on guitar than UYI is. He's as entitled to his opinion as the rest of us are...he's no more qualified than most of us are (in fact I'd argue less qualified than most of us are) to make a comparison between the 2 since we are much more intimately familiar with both pieces than he is.
The fans that prefer the new band (not to mention the fans that prefer the old band) can't even agree on liking it. That's a pretty telling tale...far more damning than anything I could say or some reviewer could write. If the people that desperately want the album to succeed can't agree on what songs are good and what songs aren't (though almost every one of them will admit there are some good and some bad ones), how do you think the rest of the world is going to view the album? If we aren't collectively blown away by anything on the album...
they can't agree on what songs they like cause this is such a diverse album. new and yougner fans will look at this album for what it is. if this album reaches these people and they like it will do well.
- A Private Eye
- Rep: 77
Re: Chinese Democracy official reviews thread
Chinese Democracy
Guns N' Roses
Grunge. Techno. Boy bands. Both President Bushes. These are just a few of the things Guns N' Roses has improbably outlasted in the 17 (!) years since its last album of original music. Almost ever since, lone original member Axl Rose has been working on "Chinese Democracy," which reached mythic status as the album many thought would never materialize. Lo and behold, here it is (as a Best Buy exclusive, no less).
Apparently to make up for lost time, the set is frontloaded with huge-sounding, heavily produced rockers coated in an ultra-modern sheen that contrasts starkly with the stripped-down, freewheeling material of GNR's glory days. Tracks like "Riad N' the Bedouins" have "Appetite for Destruction" bones but exoskeletons dipped in chrome. Rose eventually backs off and lets the songs breathe, with promising results. "Scraped" is a riffy monster in the vein of "Mr. Brownstone"; "Catcher in the Rye" is pure, major-key classic rock; and "This I Love" is a grandiose ballad you can picture Rose playing with a candelabra on the piano lid.
The artist is in fine, ever-changing voice throughout, and there's certainly a ton of musical food for thought here, requiring several listens before the nuances are revealed. Worth the wait? Maybe. Worth a few hours of your time? Definitely. -- Jonathan Cohen
