What do you think of Chinese Democracy?
 

Guns N' Roses is often times--on and off--within my Top 5 favorite bands. I view the original lineups of the band as the next logical succesors to the torch carried by The Rolling Stones and Aerosmith. Appetite for Destruction is a great rock album, if overrated; Lies is a fun little stop gap; The Use Your Illusions as flawed masterpieces, The Spaghetti Incident is downright fun, a great time. I love their cover of Sympathy for the Devil.

Having followed the history of Chinese Democracy's creation for years, we were led to believe Axl was crafting something truly epic in those years locked away in the studio.

Insiders described the album as a mix of the Wall and Physical Graffiti in sound, remixed by Trent Reznor and produced by Beck....As such I came to expect sonic masterpieces, pieces that brought the epic back to rock. Pieces similar to Achille's Last Stand, Queen, and the best of the Wall--an album of epics that would electrify the rock world--An experimental album, a perfect marriage of the clasic Hard Rock sound of the original Guns N' Roses and all the best sounds of the '90s--Grunge, industrial and so on. Ten minute long magnum opuses similar to Estranged and Coma in their complexity.

Instead, we got 14 fairly straight forward songs. For all the hype by the media and Axl himself about the album's complexity, it's a fairly straight forward album made artificially complex by adding hundreds of layers upon simple songs. It's a decent album but not at all what I expected.

What about you? What do you feel about it?

The singing style reminded me too much of Avenged Sevenfold and not enough of GnR.

I stopped listening after 10 minutes of trying to hold back the PTSD flashbacks.

I listened to it once when they had it streaming for free when it came out, then never listened to it again. That pretty much sums up my feelings about it.

This aint too bad, but then I am a bit biased:

I'm all for the people of China having a say in their government.

I thought it was massively overproduced. I thought the songs were good but there were too many years of influences from popular culture mixed into the multiple layers of music. I've said before elsewhere that eventually someone will, in the future, take those tapes, and break them down into bare-bones rock tracks and an entirely different album will emerge.

I can't believe people still talk about it. Must be that GnR name attached to it, because the music isn't what's keeping it relevant

Heard way worse 'comeback albums' from other bands. Also heard a lot better. Album for me had some enjoyable songs, If The World being my favorite and showcased that Axl could still use his voice in a powerful way.

But I'll let people keep talking about how a band isn't relevant anymore but somehow manages to pull in huge revenue with touring once in a blue moon. If people didn't care. Nobody would show up to the shows. It may have took Chinese Democracy a few good years to do it, but it's still a platinum selling record. So stick that in your know it all blow holes and spin on it.

The way people look at a bands relevance in the world here on the forum is just odd. Does anyone even know what it means and how to apply it to a band, or anything??? You don't think they have importance so you file them away in irrelevance? Doesn't make sense. Want an example of a proper way to apply irrelevance to a band? Poison. A huge band for a period in the 80's fizzled out in the 90's, then died slowly in the 2000's with spurts of success here and there before people stopped caring enough to keep them around. That didn't happen with GNR, in whatever incarnation Axl Rose resurfaced the band in. You just can't say a band isn't relevant anymore until the demand for them to tour or make any music it all is just plain and simple, gone. The figure of money thrown and Axl and Slash for this somewhat of a classic GNR reunion is ridiculously huge. Irrelevance does not bring forth a check like that folks. That is one hundred percent relevance right there.