Belated album very weird
Guns N’ Roses fans — provided they didn’t lose consciousness years ago — can stop holding their breath. The band, which has only one remaining original member (lead singer Axl Rose), finally released its monumentally anticipated album “Chinese Democracy” Nov. 23, silencing a worldwide running joke once and for all.
The album is the first studio album for Guns N’ Roses since 1993’s “The Spaghetti Incident?” and is the first album featuring new material since 1991’s “Use Your Illusion I & II.”
“Chinese Democracy” cost more than $13 million and took more than a decade to record.
Though the band began work on the new album in 1994, there were numerous obstacles, as well as lineup changes, that impeded its progress. Original guitarist Slash left the band in 1996, and in the time between his departure and the release of “Chinese Democracy,” he released four different albums with two different bands, including “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere” with Slash’s Snakepit and “Contraband” with Velvet Revolver.
As the years passed, Guns N’ Roses was only able to deliver further delays of the release date and guitarists with increasingly strange stage names, such as Buckethead, who played with the band from 2000 to 2004, and Bumblefoot, who joined in 2006.
By the time the album was completed, “Chinese Democracy” had been worked on in 14 recording studios and included a very extensive list of personnel. In addition to 12 at-one-time members of the band who are featured on the album, additional musicians provided backing vocals, harp, keyboards and French horn, to name a few. There are also numerous engineering assistants, producers and many other smaller workers credited for their help with the album.
Far less interesting than all of that is the album itself. After all of this time, it would be hard for “Chinese Democracy” not to be terribly anticlimactic.
It opens with the title track and first single, “Chinese Democracy.” A long, dramatic intro leads into the hard guitars and lyrics that comment on the Chinese government. The second track, “Shackler’s Revenge,” features some dark vocals and sounds á la the industrial metal phase that Guns N’ Roses missed out on while they were away.
The album slows the pace down briefly for “Street of Dreams,” in which the listener is briefly reminded of the singing prowess that made Rose famous years ago, but the production overshadows everything else and the vocals sound a little more unpleasant than anything.
“Sorry” features the backing vocals of former Skid Row frontman Sebastian Bach and has a slow tempo and jazzy feel at parts. All of this, however, accompanies some lackluster lyrics, like, “You close your eyes, all well and good. I’ll kick your ass like I said that I would.”
The weirdest moment in the album occurs halfway through “Madagascar,” when the song’s progression is interrupted by an interlude featuring excerpts from Martin Luther King, Jr. speeches and movie dialogue played over the guitars’ warped sound.
Overall, “Chinese Democracy” isn’t too bad. It isn’t hard to envision some old school metal heads (now in their 40s, along with Rose) rocking out to tracks like “Better” and “Catcher in the Rye.” But the album feels like it has been worked on too much and is drowning in corporate-tinged overproduction.
I dare say Rose should have left us in suspense for 20 more years.
Artist: Guns N’ Roses
Album: Chinese Democracy
Release Date: Nov. 25
Genre: Rock
Grade: B-
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