There might be a temptation for Axl Rose to make sure he gave his fans their money’s worth. Seventeen years is a long time to wait for a new album of original material for any band. And it’s not like Axl was so overly preoccupied with other things that he had to put his ambitions aside for an extended period. He just took his time, went through endless lineup changes and dumped millions and millions of dollars into the project. I imagine releasing an EP or a short LP would have been like spitting in the face of his ludicrously patient followers after so long. But there’s a difference between not giving someone enough good stuff and delivering too much mediocre stuff. Bigger is not necessarily better, and the lessons he should have learnt after the gargantuan dual Use Your Illusion project have apparently been forgotten in the nearly two decades since.
Chinese Democracy, no matter what you think about it, cannot possibly be worth the endless time and painstaking effort. Nothing short of the greatest rock opus ever committed to tape could have been. Brian Wilson would laugh at Axl Rose’s apparent unappeasable perfectionism. And I doubt that the wait was caused by a lack of material—leaked demos of songs since scrapped have appeared many times in the span and the resulting release has fourteen tracks, almost all of them epic. But here we have some seventy-one minutes of new GNR, yet it’s neither too much of a good thing nor way too much of a bad thing. It’s very difficult to make an album run as long as this and keep the audience enthralled throughout. Even Soundgarden’s 1994 masterwork, Superunknown, is far less great as a whole than the sum of its parts. Every damn song on that album was very good or better, but staying with it through its entirety could be an exhausting experience. Not a single song on Chinese Democracy can meet the heights of even Superunknown’s least impressionable tracks (“Half,” “Black Hole Sun,” “Kickstand”), so you can imagine how tireless you must be to survive to the other end and be eager to play it again.
Which is not to say that it’s an epic stuffed with filler. True, excising at least four songs would have improved its quality considerably, but even then, it’s tough to figure out which ones to get rid of. Certainly “Scraped,” with Axl’s multi-layered vocal tracks that sound like an ultra-creepy boys choir, could have gone. And the borderline execrable “Riad N’ the Bedouins,” featuring annoying aah-ahhing vocals, dramatic string stingers over crunchy guitar riffs, and so on shouldn’t have even seen life as a B-side or demo cut. As for “This I Love” and “Street of Dreams,” they’re a bit too treacly for a guy who likes to pick fights with Tommy Hilfiger. And we certainly don’t need two elephantine barnburner epics stuffed with as many tricks as a hundred magic shows could offer. But really…most of them aren’t glaringly worse than the best tracks. In the end, Chinese Democracy is neither good nor bad, but some sort of manifestation of the limbo the band found itself in for the last several years.
Axl Rose has been one of those sufferable asshole frontmen, the kind that you can’t help but loathe and admire in fairly equal quantities. But for all of his egomaniacal rockstar excess tendencies, on the rare occasion when he got it right, he was downright electrifying. And his voice from that first GNR record was an unstoppable force, willing each howling high note to pierce your heart no matter how disillusioned you had become with the repulsive L.A. hair metal scene. They truly were a fearless band back then, daring us to hate some of their more radical and truly questionable choices. A whistle solo, Axl? Are you friggin’ kidding me? But damn it if I didn’t like that song. And let’s not forget that unforgettable slice of cheese known as “November Rain,” which was so huge and operatic that no one could possibly not have an opinion on it. Guns N’ Roses stuck to their, ahem, guns by doing whatever the hell they wanted. And we bought it. Bought millions and millions of copies of it.
Bringing true danger and desperation to a scene crowded with comfortable escapism made GNR a defining force in rock music. But how could Axl possibly keep up now that the musical vogue has changed a dozen or more times since his last record? Would we be treated to something entirely new? Or would it be little more than a third chapter to the already overblown Illusion package? Actually, it’s both. Chinese Democracy has adapted to more recent trends and techniques, but for all of the left-field choices, it’s just another big, bloated rock album in a similar vein to their warts-and-all ’91 double album. If you liked them seventeen years ago and haven’t outgrown that massive sound (and easily forgive pretension), there’s little doubt you’ll find enough on this one to give it repeated spins.
How have they changed? Well, for one thing, Axl’s voice is open to contentious debate. Sometimes it’s effective, almost as much as that first time you heard “Welcome to the Jungle.” Other times, particularly when the presence of studio mastering technicians is felt, it’s worthy of groans and catcalls. When he’s stripped bare to yowl at the moon over intricate riffs, there’s that tingle in your spine. But when he’s competitive, when he feels that the power of his throat is too diaphanous to compete with all of the guitars and keyboards and violins, and he’s forced to stretch into a whine or fold into a snarl, it’s tough not to wince. Don’t try so hard Axl. Not everything you do has to grab the listener by the collar and give it a shake.
Musically, this one’s all over the map. Not in a White Album kind of way, but in an “I need more cowbell” sort of way. Within the first three songs, you feel safe in predicting that they’re not going to spring a spare acoustic number or traditional four-piece rock ditty. Even the two cuts that clock in under four minutes pull out all of the stops before the final soggy note. Each song has key changes galore, enough ideas for an entire album of material and defiantly more chutzpah than your average aging rock band. But by closing themselves off from the traditional and tried-but-true, the band risks spinning wildly out of control, which they do sometimes. It’s tough to describe the weaker material as filler since it’s obvious that they’ve spent an inordinate amount of time trying to perfect each moment—manufactured well, but manufactured all the same. Not that the sonic components have been polished to a blinding, comatose shine, but rather that each supposedly intriguing change-up has been so thoroughly over-plotted and orchestrated that spontaneity has no shape or semblance. It’s taking an adventure with GPS keeping you feeling safe.
The album opens with eerie noir, wispy voices and Middle Eastern tinges that build into a full-fledged rawk song. It’s nu-metal meets Corrosion of Conformity; a turbo-charger with vocals that layer wails and growls—Rose has rarely sounded so uninspired on the mic. But aside from the first forty seconds and the thunderstorm close, it’s stripped down and straightforward; not great by any stretch of the imagination, but heavy enough to get the blood pumping. “Shackler’s Revenge” is more in-your-face stuff, but sounds like a leftover given a Gravity Kills/Prodigy remix. So far, it’s different but not particularly good. Multiple listens allow the melodies to sink in, but they never get any smarter. But soon, the epic side of GNR will emerge and it bubbles into a “monument.”
Axl’s avant-garde discoveries frequently compete with tradition, and, make no mistake about it, pretty much every song on here could be recognized on the surface as the work of Axl Rose and his crew. Even Robin Finck’s guitar prowess is a decent imitation of Slash’s incendiary work—flattering but still of “cover band” quality. But underneath, it’s a whole new story. The indutrial-lite temerity hinted at many years ago (and “Revenge”) appears again on several tracks, including “Better” and “Riad." Hip hop and trip hop both have their place at several junctures (though Axl spares us from a labored rap). Horns appear on multiple tracks, as do strings, pianos, backward tape loops, recorded voice samples, Spanish six-strings, electronica pulses and whatever else touches Axl’s fancy.
To give you an idea of the absurdity of it all, consider the following. “Street of Dreams” opens like Styx’s “Come Sail Away.” The vocals on the funk rock “If the World” are very Prince-like, but the guitar crunch suggests Switchfoot’s “Meant to Live” by way of Collective Soul’s “harder edge”. The beginning and end of “Better” also reminisces of high-octave Prince, but in between, the arrangement is somehow both goofy and irresistible—resisting its exaggerated grandeur is near impossible. “Sorry” is a long-winded, lugubrious slow burner that bursts into doom metal black pyrotechnics at the chorus. The album climaxes twice with the epics “There Was a Time” and “Prostitute” (each closing out both halves) and are as bombastic and ultra-dramatic as anything that Wings or Journey ever attempted. And “Madagascar” opens with haunting horns, adds severe strings, throws in Moby-ish trip hop loops and even offers snippets from Martin Luther King’s “Free at last” recording.
How do they get away with such overblown ideas? Quite simply, Axl the showman knows how to push buttons. The first listen will doubtlessly elicit plenty of crinkled brows and exasperated expressions. “There is no way he’s going to get away with this” kind of stuff. But he allows his guitarists to set their instruments ablaze at the right moments to remind us that this is still a rock record. And for all of his bland phrase turns and been-there-done-that ideas, it’s tough to knock him for trying so damn hard. He’s confronting his own insecurities and challenging the rest to walk in his shoes—he gives us a middle finger and then offers an open hand to take hold. Chinese Democracy could be summed up as Axl’s life work, his magnum opus, and a last-ditch effort to remain relevant to the music community. Does he succeed? Absolutely not, but for all of its pomposity and hilarity, he knows how to pen a decent melody. Too much studio tinkering is what hamstrings most of these songs.
If we can pretend that Chinese Democracy is just another GNR album, one that followed their last record by four years instead of fifteen, it would be written off as an experiment that never really came together. It would be the labor of an artist in transition. But as the culmination of more than a decade of sweat, blood and, critically, dissatisfaction, it’s tough not to wonder if Axl should have just started from scratch after the first two thousand days yielded nothing worthwhile. The excesses are forgivable and the rhythms are usually sound, but there’s too much of not-good-enough on this album. At least it’s out and done with, though. Even laboring onward until China actually installs a democratic government couldn’t have improved these songs much.
