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Democracy a Successful Monarchy

King Axl Rules Again

Guns N Roses

Chinese Democracy

Released on Nov 24, 2008

Let me preface this: I wish I had more room.  There’s way too much to say about the process this album went through.  But, for review’s sake, here it goes…

I don’t know what I expected.  I don’t think anyone really knew.  Let’s face it: Fifteen years.  Fourteen different studios.  A completely new band lineup.  More rumors than PerezHilton.com.  In fact, the only thing that could definitively be said about Guns N Roses’s Chinese Democracy was that Axl Rose would be fronting the band.  Mind you, given his history, inferring that Axl would deliver on any sort of performance is like inferring that, obviously, a centaur will come galloping up to your front door tomorrow morning and offer to speed you off to work since the Blue line is under construction. 

Well the centaur has arrived – and he has dreadlocks.  Kicking off the album are the haunting murmurs of a crowd that are soon shot dead with a guitar riff that is somehow reminiscent of both classic Guns N Roses and Meat Loaf.  It hits where it counts though: as the rest of the band chimes in and Axl opens with the lines “It don’t really matter, you’re gonna find out for yourself,” the band is quickly transported back to that age of anger, cockiness, and chest-exploding, riff-driven rock that spawned our Appetite for Destruction.

“Shackler’s Revenge” follows it up and lets us down.  Its distinctly Disturbed-esque opening riff and awkward start-stop song-phrasing, along with Axl’s stab at “the metal growl,” feels more like “posing” than ever before. 

Fortunately, the album takes an upturn from here, appropriately with the song “Better.”  Again, the opening to this song is off-putting, with far too much production on Axl’s voice and even a drum machine.  The song quickly dives back into ass-kicking mode just as fast as it devolved.  Halfway through the first verse, that drum-machine and over-worked guitar part even fit in with the rest of the music quite well.

That’s the gist of the majority of the album.  The guitar parts are brilliant and will satiate any Slash fan.  The experimentation in newfound electronic noise is heavy and awkward when it stands alone, but fifteen years have allowed Guns N Roses enough time to fit these jigsaw pieces together. 

One of the more impressive songs, both to Axl’s and the band’s credit, is “Street of Dreams.”  It’s a dreamlike, elegiac power rock ballad a la Use Your Illusion, complete with string orchestra backing up Axl’s cries of despair and disappointment stemming from Axl’s own disenchantment.  Disenchantment with what, we never really find out (my guess: someone finally told him heroin was a bad thing). 

But that’s what we love about him.  Axl is flawed.  He’s a drug addict, an egomaniac, and he’s a white guy with dreadlocks.  But he’s still the same unabashed, heart on his sleeve, Indiana native we’ve grown to love.  His voice, despite the probable plethora of drug addictions, rings just as true as ever with that whiny howl that you grew to love back in 1987.  Perhaps the most successful part of the album is just what we’ve always loved about Axl: he’s still cocky, confident, and can pull off lines like, “All things are possible, I am unstoppable” with enough conviction that not an eye rolls in the room. 

Chinese Democracy is a long time coming.  It’s not the sort of album that will change your life (but if you’re still claiming Appetite for Destruction changed your life, I’m gonna have to claim you need to throw out those acid-wash jeans).  It is, however, epic.  For lovers of GNR’s unique brand of honest, raw power, Chinese Democracy delivers.  At times it’s hard, at times it’s soft, at times it brings to mind doves flying around the band as they play in the desert and a helicopter-mounted camera gives ethereal views of the their coke-soaked veins.  And isn’t that all we wanted out of it?

Posted by Mark Steffen on Nov 25, 2008 @ 11:10 am