In Chuck Klosterman’s review of Chinese Democracy, he says that talking about the album was somewhat like “reviewing a unicorn,” and he’s right. The near-mythical followup to the Use Your Illusion double set was a decade-and-a-half in the making, with almost $1 million spent per year to make it a reality. The album’s delay drove expectations and anticipation through the roof. And then, all of a sudden, here it is sitting on the racks of every major retailer in Canada for under $15. The absolutely surreal feeling of placing the CD into the player comes crashing down within seconds, though, as the mythology quickly dies. Once it starts, it’s just 14 songs, and 14 not particularly great songs at that.
In some places, Axl Rose sounds like the Axl Rose that left Earth somewhere in the mid-’90s. His voice is particularly great on “Better,” though the song is little more than typical radio rock. Then, when the band really amps up the Guns charm, as on “Street of Dreams,” Axl sounds wounded — he can no longer live up to the lofty cheese of “November Rain.”
The album is slickly produced, but the resulting question it provokes is a predictable one: why the hell did it take so long to put this out? And because Chinese Democracy is merely average, it’s a crushing disappointment.
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