how is the album or songs? any reviews?
Reviewed from the RollingStone mag....
David Fricke
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.
