Guns N’ Roses
Chinese Democracy
14 Tracks
Now Available
To say that Chinese Democracy has been a work in progress is a bit of an understatement. As many have heard countless times by now, hard rock icons Guns N’ Roses began work on the album in 1994 and by the time the dust had cleared, lead singer Axl Rose was the only original member left standing.
That’s 14 years — enough time for even the most rabid metalhead GnR fan to grow up a little bit from his or her musical past; but not Rose. With a collection of ace musicians to fulfill his mad-genius mission decades in the making, Rose’s vision of Chinese Democracy is one that flashes a big middle finger to what’s been going on in rock for the past years while Rose has been in a self-imposed exile. Innovative, fierce, undeniably original, yet inherently flawed, Chinese Democracy is Axl Rose in album form, for better or worse.
Gone is the blues-influenced, riff-centric rock guitar of GnR mainstay Slash, who long ago departed the band for greener pastures. But replacement Buckethead’s intriguing playing is more than interesting enough to maintain the band as guitar-oriented before anything else. From the chainsaw-buzzing riffs and swirling licks of the opening title track to the classic rock solo and funky grooves of “If The World” to the speed-metal wizardry on “Riad ‘N The Bedouins,” Buckethead and, at times, up to four other guitarists provide a blistering sonic assault to complement Rose’s inspired howling.
Even better, Rose has been sitting around on his ass for all these years, and instead of a GnR clone, Chinese Democracy is some of the most inventive, wildly creative music Rose has ever put down. “Better” starts off with an odd hip-hop drum machine beat and Rose singing “no one ever told me when I was alone / they just thought I’d know better” in falsetto before the song erupts into a stomping beat and Rose shifts into that high-pitched snarl fans know and love.
“Catcher in the Rye,” meanwhile, rides along on an Elton John-esque piano and an epic guitar line as Rose harmonizes in the background. And Rose still writes a mean pop song: “Shackler’s Revenge” is a punishing sonic assault of killswitch guitars with a surprisingly cathartic chorus and a solo that would make Slash cry.
Not all of Rose’s experiments work out for the better: The cheesy rock ballad “Street of Dreams” is too corny for its own good and seems out of place among all the other lyrical venom Rose spews throughout the record. “Sorry” is a fairly vanilla down-tempo rocker compared to all the other madness going on around it, and at over six minutes, it suffers from a common problem on Chinese Democracy: a lack of editing. But for those who know how long and how much it took to make this album, it’s not all that surprising coming from Rose.
Chinese Democracy is, without doubt, an odd album. An amalgam of blues, piano pop, electronica and good ol’ rock ‘n’ roll, it’s sort of exactly what you would expect from a man who holed up for years on end and alienated not only his entire band, but also much of his fanbase, to make an album that would blow everyone’s mind.
It doesn’t exactly do that, and it has the kind of errors you would expect from a megalomaniac with a me-against-the-world mentality and a need for perfection, but it’s also a fresh, exciting and strangely invigorating rock ‘n’ roll record. Let’s hope Axl finishes the follow-up before he dies.
Guns N’ Roses releases long-awaited album
Published: Monday, December 1, 2008
Updated: Monday, December 1, 2008
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