Man, the whole buzz on the new Guns N Roses CD, Chinese Democracy, that comes out tomorrow at Best Buy has reached ridiculous proportions. Their player on MySpace has over 55 million plays total! You can stream the entire album there if you so choose.I've listened to it a couple of times through and I have to say this... taken at face value and not as history's most elusive record, it's a good rock album. Maybe a bit too over-polished and drags on a bit at times, but there are plenty of highlights.
I was dead-set on not calling this version of the band Guns N Roses, as it's really become just Axl's own project, until I saw them live in Vegas a couple of year's ago. It was a great show and they blasted all the classics with the same balls and swagger as they did in the old days. The faces changed but it still felt good. Sure it's still Axl's project, but I guess that is Guns N Roses now. Take it or leave it.
Guns N Roses MySpace (entire album stream)
Here's some of the critical response so far, which doesn't affect my buying or my recommendation whatsoever but they're fun to read an occasionally enlightening. These are some of my favorites I've read yet.
Rolling Stone: 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.
Minneapolis Star Tribune: Is it good enough to make Rose rock's biggest star again? No, but "Chinese Democracy" should keep him from being its biggest punch line.
Spin: An outrageously overblown pop-metal extravaganza, Chinese Democracy feels like a perfect epitaph for all the absurdity and nonsense of the George W. Bush era--one final blowout before Principal Obama takes our idiocy away.
Entertainment Weekly: At times it's possible to hear the world-changing CD that Rose--whose banshee howl remains gloriously intact....But too often quantity gets in the way of quality.
The Guardian: Chinese Democracy is clearly not the greatest rock album ever made, but nor is it an absolute and utter failure. The irony is, that for all the lavishing of money and time and technology, it's saved by something as old fashioned as a good tune.
Dot Music: Meandering atmospheric intros and outros, with lyrics that often just repeat the same verse ad nauseum, overshadow what could be, at times, shorter, snappier songs.
Uncut: Soundwise, Chinese Democracy is all over the place.
Observer Music Monthly: Now that this half-cocked hard rock anachronism is here, the only laughs are unintentional. Axl: you blew it.
Culture Bully: Putting aside all thought on expectation, what the demos sounded like, why the album has taken so long to release, and if the final product sounds remotely good all becomes secondary to the fact that Chinese Democracy is finally a reality. For what it’s worth though, when considering the obstacles faced prior to its release, it’s nothing short of remarkable how good the album sounds.
Chuck Klosterman: Still, I find myself impressed by how close Chinese Democracy comes to fulfilling the absurdly impossible expectation it self-generated, and I not-so-secretly wish this had actually been a triple album. I've maintained a decent living by making easy jokes about Axl Rose for the past 10 years, but what's the final truth? The final truth is this: He makes the best songs. They sound the way I want songs to sound. A few of them seem idiotic at the beginning, but I love the way they end. Axl Rose put so much time and effort into proving that he was super-talented that the rest of humanity forgot he always had been. And that will hurt him. This record may tank commercially. Some people will slaughter Chinese Democracy, and for all the reasons you expect. But he did a good thing here.
No comments:
Post a Comment