Review Summary: Overblown, overproduce and very much in love with itself, Chinese Democracy throws in everything and the musical kitchen sink, but even after the many failed experiments, we're left with a magnificent album that, yes, only Axl Rose could have made.
Chinese Democracy is not a popular album. It's been the butt of countless jokes since its release in November 2008, being derided in everything from How I Met Your Mother to Pitchfork. It's often labelled as one of the most spectacular failures in recent music history, an overblown train-wreck that acted, for many, as the final nail in the coffin of the Guns N' Roses name. But looking back over two years later, after all the smoke has finally cleared, weren't we all being a little harsh on old Axl?
Based on the first track of the album, the title track, one would think that nothing had changed in the band since Appetite For Destruction. For the first five minutes of the album, it's the same hard-rocking, quasi-political band that we used to love, and, aside from some slightly overzealous soloing that returns throughout the record, it really didn't seem like Axl had lost his mind. But progress further into the record, and the quirks start to appear. Whether it's combinations of genres that wouldn't even have occurred to the old GNR to try out, or layered vocal intros that would have seen Axl laughed out of the rehearsals by his former bandmates, Chinese Democracy is certainly experimental.
And a lot of the time, that flair for invention that Axl displayed so prominently in the previews of the album paid off. Better's unnerving vocal intro set the tone for the rest of the song perfectly, and If The World's marriage of flamenco guitar with pulsating basslines created an atmosphere quite unlike anything we'd heard from Mr. Rose before, and for the better. The two most overblown tracks on the album, There Was A Time and Street Of Dreams, also managed to divide critics. The former features a choir (yes, on a GNR record) and the kind of soloing that would make Slash start to watch his back, and the latter sees Axl doing his best Elton John impression over some brilliantly cliched lyrics. Understandably, a lot of critics ripped these tracks a new one, but it's here that I feel they're missing the point; yes, these two songs are so over the top that it's astonishing, but that is the whole point of Chinese Democracy. It's Axl being freed of the creative chains that the old GNR had him in, and unleashing every ridiculous idea that he'd held in check for almost two decades into one insane, but brilliant, whole.
Of course, there are times when this experimentation results in a complete mess. Shackler's Revenge features one of the most dissonant verses I've heard in mainstream music in a long time, and regardless of whether this was deliberate or not, it doesn't really sound like... anything, which is a problem. Scraped also features a dreadful attempt at vocal layering that sounds more random than planned. The tenth track, 'Sorry,' features probably the most unintentionally hilarious moment in rock music, as Axl seems to be impersonating Dracula as he croons 'but I don't want to do it.' It's surreal, and whilst that bizarre tone works in the album's favour on a lot of occasions, that most certainly isn't one.
But as the saying goes, you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs. And Axl really did go for broke here. Sure, there were a few misjudgements, as I've mentioned above, but these were just the inevitable failures that come when an artist tries to make something with such scope. Axl didn't just want to make this record; he needed to. He needed to get all of the music that had been in his head for twenty years out into some physical form, and, for better or worse, every single song here is the result of that. By the time album closer 'Prostitute' comes to an end, the gorgeous strings have played out Axl's most insane moment in a suitably grandiose manner. You sit back and reflect on what you've just listened to, and you realise something; for all of the bad in Chinese Democracy, Axl really did make a full album, full of beautiful mistakes but equally full of inspiration that was lacking from the previous incarnation of GNR.
Yes, it's overblown, yes, it's overproduced, and yes, at times there is just too much going on to take in. But I can't imagine Chinese Democracy existing with lower production values than it had; it just wouldn't be the same multi-faceted, schizophrenic triumph of an album that it is. And hell, to all of the critics that didn't 'get' it, Axl himself puts it better than I ever could in a review. 'If my intentions, were misunderstood, please be kind, I've done, all I should.' But in this reviewer's opinion, Axl, your intentions were completely clear, and I'm inclined to be kind: Chinese Democracy couldn't have turned out any differently or, indeed, any better than it did.
