A couple of days ago, I did something which I hadn’t done since I was a 17 year old teenager — I went out and bought a new Guns N’ Roses album. Chinese Democracy went through 14 studios, burnt millions of dollars in production and was made over a total of 13 years.
Axl Rose’s voice is as piercing as ever and he sounds in stunning form throughout the album. The album sounds pretty polished and the production quality is just great.
But the album is a complete let-down. The album art is stunningly bland, despite the fact that Axl Rose had more than a decade to figure out how the cover could look like. The music sounds badly, badly dated: hair metal is dead, grunge has come and gone, nu metal/rap rock pushed some boundaries but Guns N’ Roses were probably in some kind of deep frozen stasis mode to even notice.
And for a hard rock album, the tempo is just horrid. There are just no fast-paced tracks to be found; just ballads and other pieces of cheesy, passable music that have minimal melody and are completely hook-free. After listening to the album almost 10 times, I still can’t remember enough to hum a damn tune from this album that was made by the band which brought us classics like Paradise City.
No, wait… the ‘band’ is now just Axl Rose and a bunch of contract musicians. This band should really have been called Hired Guns N’ Axl Rose. And they should have put this album out in 1996, not 2008.
