“Loaded Guns” - Joel McIver reviews Chinese Democracy

By Joel McIver

You know the stats. Seventeen years in the making. A $14 million studio budget. Endless delays. Multiple bootlegs. One prima donna... yes, it's been a long hard road out of hell for Axl Rose and the random cast of session musicians who make up the new Guns N' Roses, and the weight of expectation on the band's third all-studio, all-originals album is ridiculously heavy. The chances were that after such a long wait Chinese Democracy would be an anticlimax, and so it is -- but few could have predicted quite how feeble it's turned out to be.

The problem here is that Axl has had too long to fool around in the studio, with no guiding hand to push him in the right direction. With a Rick Rubin or a Jim Steinman at the controls, Waxl might have found a coherent theme and a consistent sound across the songs: as it is, the album is unfocused and doesn't really know where it's going or what to do when it gets there. Axl has come up with some decent-ish songs (“Better” and the title track are the obvious examples) but there are too many tunes that try and fail to sound like Appetite for Destruction-era Guns for us to take them seriously. The power ballads that make up about a third of the album want so badly to be “November Rain” that it hurts -- and the sub-Industrial guitar tone of many other tracks sounds a decade old. Finally, the arrogance of including a snatch of Martin Luther King's “I have a dream” speech as an audio sample is breathtaking, and not in a good way.

Time to reform the Appetite line-up, tour the world and retire, Axl. Chinese Democracy is an embarrassment.

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